Responding to recent instances of North Korean saber-rattling, Emily Landau surveys the history of the 1994 “Agreed Framework,” which failed to prevent Pyongyang from developing nuclear weapons, and, subsequently, the Obama administration’s unsuccessful policy of “strategic patience.” Landau argues that the U.S. must avoid making the same mistakes with Iran:

[Y]ears of failed negotiations followed by eight years of strategic patience [have provided] North Korea with the necessary time to advance its programs and perfect its capabilities. While the rollback of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities thus remains an elusive goal, there is a lesson to be learned for dealing with Iran. The Obama administration hailed the [2015 agreement with Tehran] as a nonproliferation success story, but the deal suffers from many critical weaknesses. Chief among them is the expiration date in nine-to-fourteen years when, with sanctions lifted, Iran will be stronger than it was before the negotiations began in 2013, and will have a much more advanced nuclear infrastructure. The Islamic Republic, virtually unhindered, is also rapidly developing its own ballistic-missile program.

The lesson should be clear: . . . there is no short-term benefit to the deal if these initial years are not used effectively to confront Iran for the sake of the long term. Iran has not demonstrated a strategic U-turn in the nuclear realm, and remains a determined proliferator.

Putting pressure on Iran is a proven path to altering its behavior—it is the toughness of the biting sanctions [introduced in] 2012 that brought Iran to the table in 2013. Replacing the pressure tactic with hopes of change in Iran . . . is misguided. . . . Moreover, after securing the agreement, President Obama, in the remaining eighteen months of his tenure, did little in response to repeated Iranian provocations and aggression. Rather than engendering moderation, this policy only served to embolden the regime. If the [U.S. and its allies] continue . . . to relax their vigilance and pressure, they will ultimately face a nuclear threat as intractable as [that posed by] North Korea.

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.