Earlier this month, the OPEC countries and Russia failed to reach an agreement to cut production, leading Riyadh to launch an all-out price war with Moscow as both ramp up their drilling. Con Coughlin analyzes some of the geopolitical ramifications:

The primary motivation behind the Saudis’ move is to protect their own share of the global oil market, which is under threat from a combination of softening demand and the renewed strength of the American oil industry. Because the Saudis enjoy low oil-production costs, . . . they are able to cope with lower oil prices, while countries like Russia, which have much higher extraction costs, need global prices to be at least $50 a barrel to make a profit. Thus the Saudi price cut, which saw oil prices fall to around $31 a barrel, will hit the Russian economy hard.

The other important consideration for the Saudis, though, is that, by undermining the strength of the Russian economy, they will force the Kremlin to rethink its ambitions on the world stage, especially its involvement in the Middle East, where Moscow’s main allies are [Riyadh’s greatest foes]: Iran and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria.

The Saudi calculation now . . . is that with the Russian economy suffering as a result of the oil-price war, the Kremlin will no longer be able to afford costly military interventions in countries such as Syria.

Since Moscow has aligned itself with Israel’s enemies in Syria, Saudi success in the endeavor would bode well for Jerusalem

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.