After over six months of escalating attacks on Washington’s allies and assets in the Middle East, Tehran has taken two steps too far: first, attacking a U.S. base in Iraq and killing an American citizen, and then responding to retaliatory airstrikes with an attack on the American embassy in Baghdad. The U.S. counterattack killed the Iranian general Qassem Suleimani and one of his most important Iraqi allies. In doing so, argues Assaf Orion, Washington has threatened the way of war that until now has brought the Islamic Republic so much success:

Suleimani’s demise came after multiple misjudgments by Iran’s leadership, [which, most importantly], failed to know its enemy. Mistaking a sleeping lion for a dead one, Tehran assumed that the United States’ reluctance to respond forcefully to its provocations extended linearly beyond the final red line: American blood.

Defying binary peace-or-war distinctions, . . . Iran’s way of war thrives in the gray zone. Tehran fights its enemies in a slow-burning, undeclared twilight war under its victims’ threshold of response. Fighting from other peoples’ lands keeps battles away from Iran’s territory. Attacking by other peoples’ hands saves Iranian blood. In its slow-motion campaign of expansion, Iran trains, funds, arms, and commands local proxy militias throughout the Middle East. While the proxies take the brunt of the battles, bearing the costs, Iran only covers expenses.

Iran’s success, however, depends on its enemies accepting its rules. . . . Iran has long been at war with the United States, though undeclared and unilateral. Until lately, this war was shaped by Iran’s strategy and fought in Iran’s comfort zone, to America’s detriment.

“The highest form of warfare,” said Sun Tzu, “is to attack strategy itself.” The American strike on Suleimani and its follow-up messaging did just that, not only depriving Iran of its top revolutionary diplomat-strategist but shaking the fundamentals of its strategy. The United States demonstrated that Iran’s attacks by proxy do not grant its forces, and possibly its territory, immunity from direct retribution. It showed that American restraint is not something to take for granted, and that a seemingly calculated challenge thought to be “below the threshold” may seriously misfire. . . . But most importantly, the U.S. finally recognized the undeclared state of war with Iran and began adapting accordingly.

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.