To safeguard its interests, protect its allies, and prevent a resurgence of Islamic State, the United States must contain the Islamic Republic’s expansionism, and to do so, argues Reuel Marc Gerecht, Washington must focus its attention on Syria. In the words of the former commander of Iranian forces in Syria, the country as “the key region” to Iranian strategy, where Tehran’s “interests can most be hurt.” But if the U.S. refuses to take action, it will leave Israel alone to stand up to the ayatollahs:

[T]o ensure that the clerical regime cannot exploit Iraq’s highway system to move soldiers and materiel, including medium-range missiles, easily into the Levant, Syria is the choke point; . . . if Tehran can develop medium-range missile bases and permanently deploy a significant ground force in Syria, all protected by advanced Russian air-defense systems, then it may be able to check Israel’s capacity to play a Middle Eastern cop, which is the role the Obama and Trump administrations have defaulted onto the Jewish state as Washington has thinned its objectives and responsibilities in the region.

With Trump’s decision not to respond militarily to Iranian attacks against shipping in the Persian Gulf and a critical Saudi oil facility, the president has seriously undermined the fear that others have had of American power. If Washington is unwilling to risk war to thwart the clerical regime’s ambitions, then the only real hard-power check on Tehran is Jerusalem.

And surrounded by ever-better missiles in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, Israel naturally would hesitate to strike the Islamic Republic. Even with the Iron Dome anti-missile shield, civilian casualties might be staggering, . . . And the possibility of an Israeli military check against the ongoing Iranian nuclear-weapons quest will diminish appreciably. The Israelis might still make an effort to take out the clerical regime’s primary nuclear facilities, given Jerusalem’s existential fear of an Iranian nuke, but the Islamic Republic would have an increasing advantage: the more ballistic and cruise missiles Tehran can deploy, the more tempting it becomes for any Israeli cabinet to just live with a doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.