In recent weeks, Iranian military vessels in the Persian Gulf have been flouting international law and accepted standards of nautical safety by navigating dangerously close to the American navy’s ships. Comparing the White House’s lack of response to these acts of provocation to its total indifference to the fate of Guillermo Farinas—a Cuban dissident subject to persistent abuse by the Castro regime—Elliott Abrams writes:

[T]he Iranian navy is making a laughingstock of the U.S. navy, taunting it with small-boat actions that endanger our ships, get within about 100 yards of them, and have forced them to take evasive action to avoid collisions. . . .

[Contrary to what the New York Times has reported], it is crystal clear that these confrontations were deliberate efforts to send a hostile message. It is crystal clear that Iran is showing the world, as it did in January with the capture [of American sailors], that the United States no longer runs the Gulf and is in fact afraid of Iran.

What has been the American response? What has the White House decided? To do nothing, and to tell the navy to bob and weave and duck. The administration remains committed to its nuclear deal above all, and is willing to allow these dangerous and humiliating maneuvers against the navy [to go unanswered]. It is engaged in covering up Iran’s violations of the nuclear deal, denying them, and allowing secret exemptions. Meanwhile Iran increases its presence and activity in Iraq and Syria and uses the nuclear deal to build its economy. . . .

[I]t will be up to our next president to distinguish between friends and enemies. If he or she wants to send the world a message that the Obama era is over and America is back, visits to Cuban dissidents like Farinas and one sinking of an Iranian ship that is illegally and dangerously harassing a U.S. navy vessel would be the best and likely the cheapest ways to do so.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”