When arguing in favor of the 2015 agreement with the Islamic Republic, Barack Obama and members of his administration insisted that European nations would not cooperate indefinitely with the U.S.-led sanctions regime. If a deal was not concluded promptly, they warned, Tehran would obtain economic relief elsewhere, without having to restrict its nuclear activities. The events of the past year prove otherwise, writes Tzvi Kahn:

[T]he Trump administration has reinstated the sanctions that President Obama lifted and then gone farther, most notably by ending the waivers that allowed some Iranian oil exports and by putting new sanctions on the industrial-metals sector. The impact on Iran has been substantial. On May 11, [Iran’s President Hassan] Rouhani likened current conditions to the country’s economic plight during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the most traumatic period of the Islamic Republic’s 40-year history. . . .

The latest economic indicators underscore Iran’s distress. In April, the twelve-month point-to-point inflation rate hit 51.4 percent, according to the state-run Iranian Statistical Center. As of Tuesday, the rial traded at 143,000 per U.S. dollar. . . . By contrast, when President Trump withdrew from the deal on May 8, 2018, the rial was trading at 64,500 per U.S. dollar. The International Monetary Fund forecast in early April that Iran’s GDP will contract by 6 percent in 2019. . . .

U.S. sanctions have [in fact] led most European companies to exit the country. Meanwhile, efforts by European governments to establish an alternative payment system that would bypass the sanctions have foundered. This reality remains inconsistent with warnings from senior Obama administration officials. . . .

[W]hile most foreign governments oppose the reinstated sanctions, international corporations have proved unwilling to risk losing access to America’s $20-trillion economy in order to conduct business with Iran’s $400-billion economy. Firms also do not wish to jeopardize their access to the U.S. dollar, which remains indispensable as a medium of trade. . . . The Trump administration should keep up the pressure by fulfilling its recent pledge to impose even more sanctions.

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.