In the past, the U.S. signed agreements with North Korea (1994) and Libya (2003) stipulating that those countries would give up their nuclear-weapons programs. While the Libyan deal succeeded, that with North Korea has been a spectacular failure. Which one, asks Max Boot, does the recent agreement with Tehran most resemble?

Though Iran has agreed to reduce the number of operational centrifuges from 9,500 to 6,000, to shrink the amount of low-enriched uranium in its possession from 10,000 kilograms to 300, and to make changes at several facilities to prevent them from being used to create nuclear weapons, all of these steps are reversible. Iran is not destroying its nuclear-weapons infrastructure as [Libya] did. Nor is it giving up ballistic missiles, renouncing terrorism, or making restitution for past attacks. It is only freezing its nuclear program, as North Korea did.

Monitoring Iran’s compliance will require onsite IEAE inspections. . . . There will be continuous monitoring of a few declared nuclear sites, but Iran will be able to delay inspections of disputed facilities for at least 24 days, which would give it time to sanitize a site. The larger problem, [however], is that, like North Korea, Iran is a big country: if the government wants to hide something, it will likely succeed. . . . Perhaps Iran will cooperate, but so far, it has not come clean with the IAEA about twelve existing “areas of concern” regarding the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program.

That is not a good sign. It suggests that Iran, like North Korea (or, for that matter, Iraq during the 1990s), is likely to play a game of cat-and-mouse with inspectors—and that if it does cheat, as North Korea did, the world will again discover it is too late to do anything about it.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.