In recent weeks, Tehran and its proxies have, apparently, attempted to sabotage commercial oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, conducted drone attacks against Saudi oil pipelines, and launched a rocket at the American embassy in Baghdad. To John Hannah, these provocations suggest that the Islamic Republic has given up on trying to wait out the tightening U.S. sanctions and is now responding with military pressure. He writes:

The Trump administration’s challenge is to demonstrate that Iran’s Plan B, escalation, will be as much of a dead end as was Plan A, running out the clock [until a Democratic president repeals the sanctions]. But . . . managing deterrence against an adversary like [Iran’s elite] Quds Force that operates in the shadows using proxies, terrorism, and other asymmetric means is far easier said than done. The United States will need its own broad menu of punitive responses, the will to implement them, and the skill to contain unwanted escalation. Further economic sanctions, cyberattacks, covert operations, and limited air and missile strikes against Revolutionary Guard assets should all be considered part of the suite of U.S. retaliatory options.

The risks of a broader conflagration must of course be taken seriously and guarded against. But . . . war is far from inevitable should the United States need to respond militarily to Iranian provocations. Israel has attacked hundreds of Iranian targets in Syria over the past two years, probably killing scores of Iranian troops in the process—all without triggering a wider war. It’s clear that Iran’s regime has no interest in getting into a major conflict with Israel, much less with the United States, which has the most powerful military in the world. . . .

The real danger for Washington is not general war but the gray zone—the murky area between peace and war—in which the Quds Force has perfected the art of acting surreptitiously and through proxies to inflict escalating costs on U.S. interests without incurring significant retaliation. Think Lebanon in the early 1980s or Iraq in the 2000s: a slow but steady bleeding, where no individual attack on its own seems to merit the risks and costs of a forceful U.S. response.

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.