Seeking to reverse decades of diplomatic isolation, and in response to increasing hostility from Western Europe, Jerusalem in recent years has cultivated better relations with a variety of states, including some with unsavory rulers—ranging from the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. While such a policy has provoked sharp criticism in some quarters, Seth Cropsey and Harry Halem explain that a small country like Israel does not have the luxury of disdaining potential allies, and, moreover, continues to do much to support American interests and with them the “liberal international order,” such as it is. Take the fraught case of its relations with Russia:

Seven years ago Tuesday, the Argentine Jewish lawyer Alberto Nisman—who was investigating the 1994 bombing of Buenos Aires’s AMIA Jewish center by Iranian agents—was shot under mysterious circumstances. As Toby Dershowitz explains, Nisman’s death was initially ruled a suicide, but the police, perhaps deliberately, contaminated the crime scene, and there is every reason to believe that Argentinian officials were responsible for his death: