Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes, both former members of President Obama’s National Security Council, have complained publicly that the current president’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 agreement with Iran “undermines the credibility of the United States” and weakens its reputation. But, as Jack Goldsmith explains, the deal had no binding legal status, and these complaints are without merit:

Presidents have the clear authority to make nonbinding political commitments. That is why I defended the legality of the Iran deal (as opposed to its wisdom) at the time [it was being concluded]. But whenever a president makes an agreement as a political commitment rather than as a binding agreement under international law, he is making a tradeoff. On the one hand, the president can avoid the need for approval from the Senate or Congress and make the international deal despite domestic opposition. On the other hand, a political commitment has no binding force under international or domestic law—and there is thus a danger that it will not be honored by a subsequent president. . . .

The Obama team was aware of this tradeoff, but it knew it had no chance to secure approval for the Iran deal from Congress. . . . For Obama to join the agreement that he thought so crucial to the fate of the world, he needed a constitutional mechanism that avoided the need for approval by Congress: . . . easier to make, easier to break. . . .

[Y]ou don’t get to make an enormously consequential international deal in the face of opposition from Congress, skirt the need for congressional consent by making the agreement nonbinding under domestic and international law, and then complain about a withdrawal from the fragile nonbinding agreement you made when a new president who ran on the issue and won does what a majority of Congress wanted at the time.

Agreements that have the approval of the Senate or Congress tend to be longer-lasting and more durable. . . . The Obama administration . . . pledged the reputation of the nation, even though it knew the Iran deal was nonbinding and lacked approval among the nation’s elected representatives. If the United States’ reputation for upholding agreements takes a hit, the responsibility for that outcome lies squarely with the original decision by the Obama administration to make the hugely consequential deal on its own.

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.