During the past 40 years, American experts and policymakers have claimed that the rulers of the Islamic Republic are divided between “moderates” and “hardliners,” and therefore that a conciliatory U.S. posture will strengthen the hand of the moderates while confrontation will only make the hardliners even more aggressive. This theory was used to justify the 2015 nuclear deal, and has likewise been cited by critics of Washington’s current policy of “maximum pressure.” But the nuclear deal was followed by years of brutal Iranian adventurism throughout the Middle East, while the present course, as Amir Taheri explains, seems to be bringing out the opposite result:

[B]adly hit by cash-flow problems, the [Iranian] regime has been forced to cut down payments to regional clients in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Gaza. This has led to a reduction in Lebanese Hizballah’s military presence in Syria while the Houthis in Yemen have also gone into slow-motion mode. Almost all offices in 30 Iranian towns and cities recruiting “volunteers” to fight in Syria, ostensibly to protect Shiite shrines, have been closed or downgraded into a symbolic presence.

The Islamic Republic has also stopped raising new fighting units of Afghan and Pakistani mercenaries. . . . At the same time, Tehran has taken no new hostages and even released three, including an American. In his meeting in Zurich with Brian Hook, Trump’s point-man on Iran, the Iranian foreign minister Muhammad Javad Zarif relayed the message that Tehran was prepared for further releases.

The daily Kayhan, believed to reflect Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s views, claimed last Tuesday that, in a letter transmitted through the Swiss ambassador, Tehran had “indicated agreement” to return to a de-facto recognition of “the Zionist regime,” disarming of the Lebanese branch of Hizballah, and ending support for Hamas.

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.