In 2014, Donald Trump tweeted that “Saudi Arabia should fight [its] own wars.” While this comment does not necessarily reflect the administration’s current thinking, one way for Washington to respond to Iran’s recent attack on Saudi oil facilities would be to encourage Riyadh to retaliate militarily while avoiding direct American involvement. Noah Rothman believes this would be a dangerous gamble:

A direct strike on Iranian targets by Saudi forces would signal a new phase in what has been a decade-long covert conflict between Tehran and Riyadh. Though the United States and its allies would provide logistical support to the kingdom, an attack on Iran by a peer competitor in the region would tempt it to respond proportionately and directly. By contrast, a U.S.-led strike on Iranian targets removes that temptation; America’s military dominance ensures that Iran would view such an engagement as an asymmetrical fight from the start, and it would prosecute such a conflict accordingly.

Iran’s aggressive behavior follows a clear pattern of escalation. It has executed sophisticated covert operations targeting the global oil supply by disabling and hijacking ships in the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. It has destroyed a $120-million American aerial surveillance drone operating above international waters. And now, it has executed an elaborate assault on a Saudi refinery.

Iran is behaving rationally by testing the limits of provocation as a tool of statecraft. Its strategic objective is to stoke anxieties among America’s Middle Eastern and European allies and, ultimately, erode global will to maintain the present suffocating sanctions regime. Eventually, Iran is likely to miscalculate, executing a bloody attack that demands a disproportionate response from the United States. This is an outcome that American policymakers are right to avoid, but not at any cost.

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.