Last week, the Pentagon reported several incidents where Iranian military boats harassed U.S. vessels in the Persian Gulf and its environs. Noah Rothman, dismissing the claim that this behavior shows that the Trump administration’s policies have escalated, rather than deterred, the Islamic Republic, puts these incidents in context:

As early as 2008, Iranian fast boats could be found making aggressive maneuvers toward American ships, but this tactic became far more common in the last decade. The pace of those incidents increased near the end of Barack Obama’s second term in office, [that is, after the nuclear deal was signed], including behaviors as reckless as the capture of U.S. sailors. From 2016 to 2018, U.S. and British patrols were regularly harassed by Iranian air and navy assets. On occasion, the episodes were so dangerous that they compelled American commanders to fire warning shots across the bows of Iranian [craft].

Even if these approaches are careless and fraught, their regularity renders them manageable. That stands in stark contrast to the kind of unprecedented behaviors in which Iran engaged over the course of 2019 that put the American and Iranian conventional militaries on a collision course. . . . The balance was tentatively restored after the U.S. strike [that killed the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani] and a face-saving retaliatory missile volley targeting U.S. positions in Iraq from inside Iranian territory, but Iran was not suddenly transformed into a placid and responsible international actor. Iranian proxies in Iraq continued to execute sporadic missile attacks on U.S. positions and, as we’ve seen, Iranian naval boats still harass Western ships in the Gulf. This is suboptimal, but it’s also the status quo ante.

The Iranian regime is a rogue entity. It will forever need to be reminded of the Western resolve to contain it until and unless the regime abandons its destabilizing activities. That is the essential nature of deterrence; it is a dance that does not end.

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.