Since Donald Trump began applying increased economic pressure on Tehran, critics have argued that, without the support of U.S. allies, these measures will prove ineffective or even backfire. After demonstrating that events have proved most objections wrong, John Hannah moves to the question of whether economic warfare can really succeed in keeping Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons:

President Trump’s maximum-pressure strategy may still seem ambitious, but hardly fantastical. Indeed, at least as far as constraining the regime’s resources is concerned, it’s impossible at this point to argue that the policy is not making progress. The regime is systematically being denied billions of dollars that it heretofore was using both to subsidize its domestic stability and to finance its imperial ambitions. As its revenues continue to shrink, choices about resource allocation have grown increasingly difficult.

While the tightening squeeze may not yet have translated into a noticeable retrenchment of its regional activities, the regime’s day of reckoning is almost certainly coming as the specter of financial insolvency looms on the horizon. It is lashing out now [with its recent attacks on the oil trade] precisely because it feels the walls closing in and hopes to force the United States to back off before its situation becomes much more perilous. Iran’s decision to escalate is, paradoxically, a sign that the maximum-pressure campaign may be working, not failing. . . .

The chances that the European Union or other world powers will be capable of circumventing the U.S. sanctions wall, now or in the foreseeable future, are slim. What remains in serious doubt, however, is whether Trump’s maximum-pressure policy can be translated into strategic outcomes—by significantly eroding the regime’s ability to project power and forcing it back to the negotiating table to work out a new agreement that substantially improves on the 2015 deal. All, of course, while containing Iranian escalation and avoiding a costly war.

Trump’s critics are betting that it can’t be done. They could eventually turn out to be right. But for now, that judgment remains premature. The ultimate success or failure of Trump’s Iran policy, as well as the utility of economic coercion as a strategic weapon in the U.S. foreign-policy arsenal, is still very much an open question.

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.