While pursuing its “maximum-pressure” policy toward Tehran, consisting of intense sanctions and the occasional application of military force, the Trump administration still seems to hold out some hope that these measures can induce the mullahs to come to the negotiating table, agree to abandon their nuclear ambitions, and restrain their campaign of regional bloodletting and global terror. But this will never happen so long as the current regime is in place, argue Eric Edelman and Ray Takeyh. (Free registration required.)

[Previous U.S.] administrations have failed to understand that the Iranian regime remains, at heart, a revolutionary organization. Once in power, revolutionaries often yield to the temptations of moderation and pragmatism. . . . But four decades after its birth, the Islamic Republic continues to avoid that fate. Its elites still cling to the revolution’s precepts even when they prove self-defeating.

For [its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini and his disciples, the continued vitality of their revolution mandated its relentless export. This was to be a revolution without borders; its appeal would not be limited by cultural differences or diverging national sensibilities within the Muslim world. Khamenei has faithfully carried out that mission, backing proxy militias throughout the Middle East with the goal of advancing Iranian-style Islamism and undermining the U.S.-backed regional security order.

In the mullahs’ preferred narrative, the imperialist United States seeks to exploit the region’s resources for the aggrandizement of the industrial West. Achieving that goal requires Washington to subjugate the Muslim world by backing corrupt Arab monarchies and an “illegitimate Zionist entity.” The Iranian regime sees resisting that American dominance as a divine imperative. That is why the Islamic Republic will never evolve into a responsible regional stakeholder. . . . It will never abandon its nuclear ambitions for the sake of commerce. And it will never recognize any U.S. interests in the Middle East as legitimate. The revolutionaries will never give up their revolution.

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.