While a ceasefire agreement recently concluded between Turkey and Russia has temporarily reduced the fighting in the northwest Syrian province of Idlib, it is likely that Moscow and Damascus will eventually violate it as they did the 2018 ceasefire that created a “de-escalation zone” in Idlib. America, argues Frederic Hof, could use the situation to its strategic advantage, but instead has resorted to the same “pseudo-diplomacy” that has characterized its policy toward Syria since the civil war broke out there in 2011:

Ideally Washington would be encouraging Ankara to plan a ground campaign to clear Assad’s forces and Iranian-led foreign fighters from much of Syria’s northwest. . . . The plan would be implemented quickly after the [Assad] regime violates the current ceasefire. The desired result would be a protected zone large enough to allow recently displaced Syrian civilians safely to return home. Once the protected zone is established, al-Qaeda-related elements can, to the delight of Syrian civilians, be identified and neutralized.

Ankara would not undertake such an operation without adequate air defense for its ground forces. This is where a serious private warning from Washington to Moscow would be in order, something along the following lines: “If your client violates the ceasefire, we will support Turkey’s efforts to rectify the matter militarily. We would not hesitate, using our own assets, to engage and to destroy your client’s air forces and air defenses. And if Turkish ground forces come under air attack from any quarter, we will assist Turkey in countering that threat.”

Perhaps such a quiet message has already been delivered. But at least three times senior American officials have publicly gutted American diplomacy by declaring military measures to be off the table.

For nine years the West has . . . preemptively conceded escalatory dominance to Russia and even to the Assad regime. It has hoped against hope that Syria’s suffering would stay inside Syria, and it has lulled itself into stupor with useless communiques condemning “in the strongest possible terms” ongoing crimes against humanity and reciting the mantra about there being “no military solution” for Syria. Russia has seen abject weakness and has exploited it far beyond Syria. This will continue unless the West decides to adopt diplomatic practices appropriate to countering adversaries feeling no limits to their violent, criminal depredations. Yes, even interventions far short of invasion and occupation pose risks. Will anyone still argue that preemptive passivity and pseudo-diplomacy do not?

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.