This latest war by terrorists on innocent Jews is an indictment of an entirely warped philosophy overtaking foreign policy establishment and prevailed through the last three presidential administrations: that the United States must “pivot” away from the Middle East toward more urgent challenges in places like Beijing and Moscow. Indeed, the George W. Bush administration was the last to reject such naïveté.

For the Obama administration, the Iran nuclear agreement represented an effort to repudiate the post-9/11 wars — “forever wars” that halfwit isolationists adore referencing on cable news — and settle millennia of questions in the Middle East with a deal to effectively make everything go away. It was a contemptible deal, but the juvenile philosophy underpinning it is categorically false. Perhaps that’s why Barack Obama has inexplicably not said a word in roughly 60 hours since the catastrophe.

The Trump team understood the foolhardiness of the Iran nuclear deal, but with its obsessions over trade, believed there was some “deal” to offload the entire region. Their Iran policy would properly weaken the Iranian economy while subcontracting management to a new coalition of Sunni Arabs and Israel. While it was heartening to see a half-century of anti-Jewish enmity subside, the Trump policy was just another pivot.