In October, a UN Security Council ban on selling military equipment to, or buying it from, the Islamic Republic is set to expire. Behnam Ben Taleblu explains why it is crucial that Washington do everything in its power to ensure that the ban is renewed:

The end of the embargo brings with it a two-fold conventional-arms challenge: Iranian military modernization through the legal importation of weapons, as well as Iran’s greater export of weapons that enhance the lethality of its proxies and partners. While Iran has already violated [the resolution] through attempts both to procure and to proliferate weapons, losing the international architecture with which to call this activity a “violation” and rally the international community to act permits Tehran to . . . chip away [with greater ease] at the existing balance of power in the Middle East.

At the helm of the effort [to let the embargo lapse] are Russia and China, two states Iran has already lobbied to oppose the U.S. at the Security Council. . . . Both [countries] played an outsized role in Iran’s re-armament after the Iran-Iraq War, helping it gain access to a limited quantity of fighter jets, diesel submarines, and anti-ship missiles. Both states also signed up during that era to aid Iran’s nuclear program.

While Russia and China are not predisposed to provide Tehran with every capability it desires, empowering Iran would create more headaches for Washington and [distract the U.S. from dealing with the problems of Russian and Chinese aggression]. In 2017, the U.S. National Security Strategy warned that the era of “great-power competition” was back, with Russia and China more inclined to challenge Washington’s “geopolitical advantages” around the world. Iran is now set to be one theater for this contest.

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.