(Tribune News Service) — Iran is an American enemy already, a pal with China and Russia, economically up-and-at-’em, more than a little pleased about its missile and warhead accomplishments, capable of producing nuclear weapons in a hurry and now in a war with Israel making the world less safe every minute. Possible consequences include a second international cold war threatening disastrous American decline or, conceivably, even a third world war.

Hey, wait a minute, you say, Iran is not at war with Israel; it’s Hamas, the terrorist ruler of Gaza, the next-door neighbor accompanied by other Middle East groups such as the Houthis and Hezbollah lending a hand as needed.

Well, yes, that’s the case with military action, but these proxies and others listen carefully to whatever Iran says. And, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it has talked about Israel as a “cancerous tumor” and a place that has to be “wiped off the map,” for instance. Don’t doubt that the urgent, self-enlarging, hateful impulse has been to kill all those Jews, to extinguish the menace, to rule the Middle East.

Iran’s leaders also hate America, much of Europe and large portions of the rest of the world. For a while, Iran’s nuclear and missile ambitions met significant resistance by way of sanctions that weakened it economically and threatened far more hurt in case of discovered transgressions.

Ah, but the United States elected Barack Obama as president and soon enough he was granted a Nobel Peace Prize for nothing much but eloquent utterances about being nice as the best means of achieving peace. Such was the background when the United States and a panel including China and Russia worked out a deal with Iran that let it off the sanctions hook and thereby enriched the country by billions.

Iran has lots of oil and doesn’t need nuclear power for domestic energy, but the deal said, hey, keep that nuclear infrastructure that along with other means can allow pretty quick production of nuclear weapons. If you want to keep fooling around with missiles when the United Nations insists you shouldn’t, well, go ahead even if we will be surprised when you come up with worrisome capabilities. Put it all together, and the deal should have been a far stricter treaty actually accomplishing something.

Well, a succeeding president, Donald Trump, got rid of the deal and began reinstating sanctions, something he could not have done if it had been a treaty, and himself deserved a Nobel Prize for another achievement. He and his advisers worked out a plan, something called the Abraham Accords, under which Arab countries are encouraged to establish friendly relations with Israel. The march began. Of course, after one term, Trump had a successor, too, namely Joe Biden, who tried one thing and then another that didn’t work until here we are with Iran-supported Hamas committing one of the worst horrors of recent decades and Israel fighting back fiercely as a way of not being wiped off the map.

A ruler of some 90 million people, some of whom fiercely resent these super ambitious, cruelty insistent controllers of their lives, Iran has a long view that includes joining with China and Russia to rule the world. The three get together every now and then, and just as Iran receives benefits from the association, its vast reserves of oil help meet China’s energy needs and it has sent Russia drones to help kill Ukrainians.

This year’s presidential debates must address these issues as well as the outrageous antisemitism afflicting us, not least at elite universities that may someday be known as trash-heap universities. As a nation we have a host of issues, and, if we take it easy, they won’t. The point right now is to focus on 2024 as a positive turning point.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service.

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