“If Russia, or some other entity, was hacking, why did the White House wait so long to act?” So asked President-elect Donald Trump last Thursday morning. The question, asked also by many of Trump’s Democratic adversaries, is a good one. If, as recent news reports indicate, the Obama administration knew all along that Russia was involved in hacking and releasing private Democratic communications in order to affect the recent U.S. election, why didn’t the administration do something to make them stop? The answer, writes Noah Rothman, has everything to do with President Obama’s desire to protect his legacy, a legacy “bound up in the Iran nuclear deal.”

The hacking of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s server occurred in March 2016. Three months later, in June, the DNC was targeted by hackers with what private security firms confirmed at the time were links to the Russian government. By July, when the documents recovered from those hacks were released by WikiLeaks, Democrats and the press were celebrating the success of the Iran nuclear deal on its first birthday.

Without Moscow’s cooperation [in maintaining that deal], there would have been no supposed triumph to celebrate.

By July, Russia was working with Iran on practical matters related to Tehran’s end of the bargain. Moscow was helping to convert the hardened, underground enrichment facility at Fordow into a production facility for medical isotopes and preparing to receive Iranian shipments of low-enriched uranium. The White House also feared in July that congressional Republicans could make life difficult for the White House by blocking the Energy Department from purchasing Iranian heavy water, thereby forcing Iran to offer the profitable opportunity to Moscow. . . .

The White House, in other words, was afraid that publicly confronting Russia over election hacking would lead to Russian withdrawal from their involvement in the nuclear deal. Rothman concludes:

Democrats are right to be incensed over Russia’s brazen intervention in American politics. [But] their anger is, in part, directionless because their partisan instincts require them to misdirect their ire. The Obama administration’s misguided efforts to reshape the strategic balance in the Middle East is responsible for [Russia’s] current undeserved status as geopolitical kingmaker.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.