In February, the Democratic National Committee resolved that the U.S. ought to resume participation in the 2015 nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic. David Albright and Andrea Sticker point to the disastrous consequences of such a course, and warn that, unless Washington seizes the opportunity to renegotiate and strengthen the deal’s terms, Iran will have a ten-year glide path to nuclear weapons.

The statements [of politicians and analysts] urging rejoining typically contain notable mischaracterizations, such as asserting that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stated Iranian “compliance” with the deal, something the IAEA has never certified in its quarterly safeguards reports. Moreover, each quarter since the deal has been implemented in January 2016, the IAEA has reported that it still has not been able to determine that Iran has no undeclared nuclear facilities and materials and thus cannot conclude that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful. While Iran has been pressed successfully to stop its multiple technical violations of specific nuclear limitations, the basic proposition of whether Iran seeks nuclear weapons has not been answered in the three-plus years since the deal commenced. . . .

Supporters of the deal had hoped that the deal by itself would open new diplomatic channels to address other international concerns, such as Iran’s aggressive regional behavior, ballistic-missile developments, and human-rights violations. In reality, these international concerns have grown worse following the implementation of the nuclear deal. European diplomats are coming to appreciate that, even while they have sought to stay in the deal. Increasingly, even supporters of the deal in the United States recognize that.

The most likely endpoint of the [deal as it now stands] is an Iran that in about a decade can quickly build nuclear weapons mounted on intermediate-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles, lacks an inspection regime that can ensure that Iran does not have undeclared nuclear facilities and materials, and has greatly expanded its conventional armed forces and its ballistic-missile arsenal.

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.