Outrage over the Trump administration’s border-control policies, and especially the separation of children from their parents, has led to comparisons with the Third Reich. To John Podhoretz, such comparisons are obscene:

[T]here’s nothing new in deploying the Holocaust as a political or aesthetic cudgel. What’s different about [recent discussions] is that expressions of concern about the misuse of the Holocaust analogy have been the occasion for heated, even enraged, criticism: no, [the critics are saying,] it is those who object to likening the extremely bad policy of the Trump administration to the worst event in human history who are doing wrong. . . .

Bad things that happen on earth are not all the same. Some are bad. Some are worse. One or two in all of human history were of a scope and size and horror that they cannot be analogized.

Moreover, even those who want to liken the present moment to, let’s say, the rise of Nazi rule in Germany and say they’re doing so to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust are doing something very wrong. By likening the Jews of Germany to the [prospective immigrants] at the border, they are implicitly accepting the Nazi contention that Jewish Germans were foreign presences rather than German citizens whose very existences on the earth were slowly and systematically being outlawed by the government of the country in which they were born. . . . When you make such an argument, you are lowering and lessening and making more invisible as time passes the unthinkable and unimaginable scope and size of the Shoah. . . .

[T]hose who treat the dreadful separation of parents from children at the border over the past months as though we are living through [William Styron’s novel] Sophie’s Choice are not expressing righteous anger. They are guilty of the worst kind of self-righteous preening. To paraphrase Elie Wiesel, they are cheapening the Holocaust and draining it of its substance.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.