Iran’s nuclear program isn’t just a threat to Israel, but a major concern for the United States, one recognized by the past several presidential administrations. Unless the IDF destroys key nuclear facilities in another attack on the Islamic Republic—which is not an impossibility now that it has taken out Iranian air defenses—it will be a problem the next president will have to reckon with. And regardless of what happens next in the current war, the victor in tomorrow’s election will not be able to ignore the Middle East.

Michael Mandelbaum, reviewing Steven Cook’s recent book The End of Ambition, has some advice on this score:

The country that now threatens American interests is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is conducting an active campaign to achieve dominance in the region by unseating governments friendly to the United States and evicting American forces from the Middle East. That campaign has met with considerable success. Iran now exercises substantial, indeed sometimes dominant, influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.

If . . . the Islamic Republic should acquire nuclear weapons, as it is actively seeking to do, its capacity to harm America’s friends and American interests would expand dramatically. The most important task for American Middle East policy is, therefore, to prevent that from happening.

Past American Middle Eastern policy has another implication for the future. For decades, successive American administrations pursued a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians living in Gaza and on the West Bank of the Jordan River. These efforts all failed, and for the same reasons that American democracy-promotion efforts in the Middle East came to nothing: the political, cultural, and institutional bases for a Palestinian state willing to live peacefully beside Israel have never existed, and the United States cannot create them.

Absent, however, the Palestinians becoming what they have thus far never been—a genuine partner for peace—the American government should waste no more time on what has come, over the years, to be called the peace process. The United States has more urgent Middle Eastern business, business that can, and must, be successfully concluded, with Iran.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.