Commenting on the bloody assault on the Syrian city of Idlib by Bashar al-Assad’s forces and their Russian allies, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien stated that he does not think that the U.S. will “intervene militarily.” While Washington ought not be in any rush to go to war with Russia over Syria, writes Frederic Hof, such declarations only serve to communicate weakness and undermine American deterrence. The mistakes of the Obama administration should be sufficient to make this clear:

Barack Obama, in erasing his own [2012] chemical-weapons red line, convinced Vladimir Putin that the United States would stand firm nowhere. Putin assaulted Ukraine . . . with a powerful sense of impunity. [Likewise], by assuring Iran that its Syrian client would be immune from U.S. military strikes, the Obama administration needlessly traded the lives of Syrian civilians for the 2015 nuclear deal.

Although the Trump administration retrieved a measure of American credibility by twice retaliating militarily for regime chemical attacks on civilians, it has all but declared that Assad may do as he wishes to civilians, provided he does so without chemicals. And now the national security advisor has gone out of his way to put Russian and Syrian regime minds at ease as a vicious campaign of civilian-centric state terror drives hundreds of thousands of terrified refugees in the direction of Turkey.

To minimize the possibility that Russians, Syrians, and Iranians will go too far in jeopardizing the security of its NATO ally Turkey by inflicting mass homicide on defenseless Syrian civilians—inadvertently provoking an American military defense of an ally—those who engage in mass murder must not be assured of American passivity.

[Instead], the Kremlin should be told privately that a point could be reached in Idlib province where Turkey would feel obligated to intervene militarily against regime forces on a massive scale. And, if that happens, the United States would help defend its ally from the air if such support is required. This must not be a red-line bluff. But if Washington truly wishes to minimize the possibility of military events in Idlib province spinning out of control, it will do the Kremlin the favor of allowing it—for a change—to worry about the potential consequences of conflict and escalation.

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.