After a hiatus from involvement in the Middle East that began in 1991, Russia has reasserted itself in the region through its intervention in the Syrian civil war. Jakub Grygiel explains how America made this return possible through empty rhetoric, passivity, and shortsightedness:

[T]he Obama administration sought to weaken Bashar al-Assad on the cheap, by arming groups like the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). This [decision] created deep and lasting tensions between the U.S. and Turkey as Ankara considers this particular Kurdish entity too close to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist organization that has battled Turkish forces since the early 1980s. The resulting strain in U.S.-Turkish relations further enticed Russia to return to the region, forcing [Turkey’s] Recep Tayyip Erdogan to accept Vladimir Putin’s influence in Damascus and to seek some sort of understanding with Moscow.

Thus, argues Grygiel, the U.S. inadvertently pushed Erdogan into Putin’s open arms. And, contrary to what some experts would argue, no amount of diplomatic maneuvering will turn the Kremlin into an American partner in efforts to restore order to the Levant:

Russia . . . is not eager to rebuild Syria or to ameliorate the humanitarian disaster caused by Bashar al-Assad and the Islamist terrorist groups; it merely seeks bases from which it can exercise some influence over the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, Vladimir Putin’s approach is to destabilize a region, creating a problem to which he can then offer a solution.

This is a time-tested strategy that Russia has employed since its rise in the early 18th century: sowing instability in order then to be able to reorder the area according to its interests. Thus, Russia has presented itself to European leaders as a staunch defender of Christians against the depredations of Islamist terrorists and, to the more secular politicians in Western Europe, as a force to limit the flow of refugees—while at the same time doing little to fight Islamic State and aiding Assad in his gruesome suppression of the opposition.

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.