Syrian opposition leaders asked John Kerry last September why America wouldn’t support them in fighting Iranian proxies like Hizballah. The secretary of state bluntly replied that “Hizballah is not plotting against us.” This statement, difficult to believe at the time, has been proved decisively false by the recent arrest of two highly trained Hizballah agents—both naturalized U.S. citizens. Marc C. Johnson writes:

It seems clear now that Kerry’s principal motivation in attempting to steer the opposition away from any confrontation with Iran’s terrorist proxies was fear of angering the regime in Tehran. Kerry was at pains to avoid jeopardizing the Obama administration’s already fragile nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, which Barack Obama and his team desperately wanted to hold up as a key, legacy-burnishing foreign-policy achievement. But Kerry’s off-the-cuff comment betrayed either a shocking ignorance or cynical indifference. . . .

Hizballah, it should be noted, is the most advanced terrorist organization operating today. It long ago became a de-facto state within the country of Lebanon [and] has both a functional military wing and fairly sophisticated intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities. The members of this latter branch . . . operate just like many moderately advanced sovereign intelligence and security services the world over. They identify, train, recruit, and dispatch spies for all the usual reasons that nation-states do so. But their spies have the added mandate of preparing for and executing terrorist attacks.

For every [Hizballah operative] that is caught and prosecuted, there are others still lurking in the shadows. And these are no mere “sleeper cells”; they are active, planning, and preparing for eventual operations against and even within the United States. Dangerous as Islamic State and al-Qaeda may be, they have achieved nowhere near this level of sophistication in terms of planning, training, or spycraft. Arrests such as these are a sobering reminder that, contrary to what John Kerry may believe, Hizballah continues to plot against us, both here and abroad.

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.”