Later this week, the White House will decide whether to renew five waivers of sanctions on Tehran’s civilian nuclear program. The waivers were instituted as part of the 2015 agreement with the Islamic Republic, and President Trump has continued to renew them even after withdrawing from the agreement. But Andrea Stricker and Behnam Ben Taleblu argue that the U.S. should let the waivers on two of the most dangerous aspects of the Iranian nuclear arsenal—its reactors in the cities of Fordow and Arak—expire:

Despite the passage of four years since the deal entered into force, Tehran has still not converted the [Fordow] facility into a “nuclear, physics, and technology center” for relevant international scientific cooperation, as it pledged. Moreover, Tehran has slow-rolled any genuine effort [to do so].

Since the 2015 deal was reached, information from a treasure trove of secret archive documents relating to Iran’s nuclear program indicates that this once covert and highly fortified facility was originally planned for weapons-grade-uranium production for one to two nuclear weapons per year. Its past intended use, coupled with the fact that it is buried deep underground, is why Iran considers Fordow a strategic facility and, accordingly, delayed its conversion for more peaceful purposes. . . . Canceling the waiver for Fordow would signal that Washington will not bless any of these moves, and it would be a step toward righting a wrong from the nuclear deal that permitted Fordow to remain open in the first place.

At issue in Arak is whether Iran has already circumvented restrictions on the plutonium pathway toward nuclear weapons, [which Iranian officials have as much as admitted to doing]. Continuing to waive sanctions related to Arak would amount to the administration throwing its hands up in the face of Iran’s bragging about how it bypassed one of the few nonproliferation achievements of the nuclear deal.

There is no substitute for U.S. leadership on the matter. The Trump administration continues to use the rhetoric of maximum pressure against Iran. Revoking and suspending two waivers related to the regime’s illicit nuclear activities would go a long way toward backing up this rhetoric with concrete policies.

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.