Last week, the Pentagon reported several incidents where Iranian military boats harassed U.S. vessels in the Persian Gulf and its environs. Noah Rothman, dismissing the claim that this behavior shows that the Trump administration’s policies have escalated, rather than deterred, the Islamic Republic, puts these incidents in context:

As early as 2008, Iranian fast boats could be found making aggressive maneuvers toward American ships, but this tactic became far more common in the last decade. The pace of those incidents increased near the end of Barack Obama’s second term in office, [that is, after the nuclear deal was signed], including behaviors as reckless as the capture of U.S. sailors. From 2016 to 2018, U.S. and British patrols were regularly harassed by Iranian air and navy assets. On occasion, the episodes were so dangerous that they compelled American commanders to fire warning shots across the bows of Iranian [craft].

Even if these approaches are careless and fraught, their regularity renders them manageable. That stands in stark contrast to the kind of unprecedented behaviors in which Iran engaged over the course of 2019 that put the American and Iranian conventional militaries on a collision course. . . . The balance was tentatively restored after the U.S. strike [that killed the Iranian general Qassim Suleimani] and a face-saving retaliatory missile volley targeting U.S. positions in Iraq from inside Iranian territory, but Iran was not suddenly transformed into a placid and responsible international actor. Iranian proxies in Iraq continued to execute sporadic missile attacks on U.S. positions and, as we’ve seen, Iranian naval boats still harass Western ships in the Gulf. This is suboptimal, but it’s also the status quo ante.

The Iranian regime is a rogue entity. It will forever need to be reminded of the Western resolve to contain it until and unless the regime abandons its destabilizing activities. That is the essential nature of deterrence; it is a dance that does not end.

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.