Looking at the looming possibility of a renewed Russian offensive against Ukraine from an Israeli perspective, Efraim Inbar writes:

American behavior in the Ukraine crisis also affects the nuclear talks in Vienna. Tehran, already convinced that America is weak, gets even greater leeway and can further procrastinate until an agreement it desires will be offered. Iran could unleash its proxies against American allies in the Middle East. Israel could decide to avoid notifying Washington before acting forcefully. A Russian victory in Europe could precipitate a conflagration in the Middle East.

Similarly, China could learn that U.S. determination is melting away, and its threats can be ignored. An attack on Taiwan could follow.

The Ukraine predicament again demonstrates the uselessness of international guarantees. The 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by the Russian Federation, the UK, and the U.S., provided security assurances against threats or force against the territorial integrity of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in exchange for giving up their nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the memorandum was not respected when Russia conquered Crimea in 2014.

International institutions failed similarly. The U.S. called a UN Security Council meeting to discuss Moscow’s troop build-up on its borders with Ukraine, knowing that Russia can veto. In Washington, this so-called “preventive diplomacy” ended in futile angry clashes between Russian and American envoys.

Prime Minister Varadkar’s meretricious messaging concerning the freeing of a kidnapped child is only one example of the Irish government’s perverse reaction to Hamas’s assault on Israel. Varadkar has accused the IDF of pursuing “something approaching revenge” in Gaza, and compared the Israeli war effort to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His parliament, meanwhile, came close to expelling the Israeli ambassador. Terry Glavin writes:

In a recent interview, . . . the retired Irish diplomat Niall Holohan put it this way: “We feel we have been victimized over the centuries. It’s part of our psyche—underneath it all we side with the underdog.” But there’s something else in the Irish psyche that’s impolite to mention in the comfy Dublin pubs and bistros. . . . Not a few of Ireland’s gallant and celebrated champions of the underdog, its heroes of Irish freedom, were vulgar anti-Semites and Nazi collaborators.

And in recent years, Irish Jews are commonly baited, harassed, and badgered every time there is some eruption in Israel involving Palestinian “resistance.”

The republican pamphleteer Arthur Griffith approved [of anti-Jewish agitation in Limerick in 1904], calling Jews “usurers and parasites.” Griffiths was one of the founders of Sinn Féin, in 1905, and he served as Sinn Féin’s president in 1911.

There was always a deep division in the Irish nationalist movement between Irish republicans who felt an affinity with the Jews owing to a shared history of dispossession and exile, and Catholic extremists who ranted and raved about Jews. Those Catholic shouters are still abroad, apparently unaware that for half a century, Catholic doctrine has established that anti-Semitism is a mortal sin.