In recent weeks, Tehran and its proxies have, apparently, attempted to sabotage commercial oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, conducted drone attacks against Saudi oil pipelines, and launched a rocket at the American embassy in Baghdad. To John Hannah, these provocations suggest that the Islamic Republic has given up on trying to wait out the tightening U.S. sanctions and is now responding with military pressure. He writes:

The Trump administration’s challenge is to demonstrate that Iran’s Plan B, escalation, will be as much of a dead end as was Plan A, running out the clock [until a Democratic president repeals the sanctions]. But . . . managing deterrence against an adversary like [Iran’s elite] Quds Force that operates in the shadows using proxies, terrorism, and other asymmetric means is far easier said than done. The United States will need its own broad menu of punitive responses, the will to implement them, and the skill to contain unwanted escalation. Further economic sanctions, cyberattacks, covert operations, and limited air and missile strikes against Revolutionary Guard assets should all be considered part of the suite of U.S. retaliatory options.

The risks of a broader conflagration must of course be taken seriously and guarded against. But . . . war is far from inevitable should the United States need to respond militarily to Iranian provocations. Israel has attacked hundreds of Iranian targets in Syria over the past two years, probably killing scores of Iranian troops in the process—all without triggering a wider war. It’s clear that Iran’s regime has no interest in getting into a major conflict with Israel, much less with the United States, which has the most powerful military in the world. . . .

The real danger for Washington is not general war but the gray zone—the murky area between peace and war—in which the Quds Force has perfected the art of acting surreptitiously and through proxies to inflict escalating costs on U.S. interests without incurring significant retaliation. Think Lebanon in the early 1980s or Iraq in the 2000s: a slow but steady bleeding, where no individual attack on its own seems to merit the risks and costs of a forceful U.S. response.

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.