While our avowed admirer of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un spent American taxpayers’ dollars parading military hardware through Washington, D.C., in order to celebrate his 79th birthday and sent troops to quell protests about the forcible detention of immigrants, Democrats scratched their heads wondering why they’re so unpopular among Americans generally. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that only 36% of Americans regarded the Democratic Party favorably and 57% regarded it unfavorably. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that 70% of Americans disapprove of Congressional Democrats.

And that was before the witless response of many leading Democrats to the long deferred and plainly necessary Israeli preemptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities at a decisive inflection point when the failure to finally act would have left Iran with nuclear weapons — precisely that which Democratic politicians mouthing the usual blather have long professed was “unacceptable.” Iran was just days from being able to produce nuclear warheads. A 60-day period of negotiations with the United States that has followed many years of unsuccessful negotiations seeking to persuade Iran to dismantle its nuclear program had expired. Iran had opted to disregard repeated warnings that time had run out.

The historically toothless International Atomic Energy Agency had finally formally declared Iran in breach of its obligations, rousing itself from its bureaucratic torpor to condemn Iran’s “general lack of cooperation” and finding that Iran had enough uranium enriched to near weapons-grade purity to make nine nuclear bombs. “Iran’s many failures to uphold its obligations since 2019 to provide the agency with full and timely cooperation regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran … constitutes non-compliance with its obligations,” stated the IAEA in genteel, virtually neutered diplomo-speak.

As Democratic politicians no less than Republicans have recognized, or professed to recognize, for Israel this is no genteel matter. For decades, our State Department has determined Iran to be the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. Iran’s mullahs have funded and orchestrated tens of thousands of rocket attacks on Israeli civilians through its Hamas and Hezbollah proxies. They have repeatedly, expressly pledged to incinerate Israel, and with nuclear weapons will forthwith have the means to do so. They organized the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel by 5,000 Hamas gunmen who slaughtered 1,300 innocents, and the thousands of Hezbollah rockets directed at Israeli civilians from Lebanon that commenced the very next day.

The obvious question for most Americans is: In light of this, what is Israel supposed to do? Clap for Tinker Bell?

The answer given by too many Democratic pols is: We don’t know, and we don’t care. “It’s pretty transparent that this was an effort to submarine, to undermine our diplomacy,” sniffed Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., positioning himself to appeal to an increasingly anti-Israel Democratic primary voters in a 2028 presidential run. “Now it looks as if diplomacy has no chance.”

But diplomacy aimed at getting Iran to abandon its race to nuclear weapons had failed, yet again, and Iran was poised to win the race.

No matter.

Here was Sen. Bernie Sanders, who, when it comes to inanity on the subject of Israel, is peerless: “The world is more dangerous and unstable as a result of the extremist Netanyahu’s government ongoing defiance of international law,” Sanders said. But the world is in fact a great deal safer, and the chances for a diplomatic deal with Iran much better, with Iran’s nuclear weapons program degraded and ballistic missile stocks shattered.

Sanders’ comments were pure genius next to those of Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who claimed that he could not understand why Israel would launch a preemptive strike when there were further meetings between the U.S. and Iran scheduled, unable to grasp, evidently, that by all accounts the meetings were going nowhere and Iran was just days from making those meetings moot.

Here it is in a nutshell. In June 2006, when Iran was already on the march to acquiring nuclear weapons, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., now the second ranking Democratic Senator, was asked in a Boston law office what the Democrats’ plan was for stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

That was 19 years ago.

“I don’t know,” Durbin replied. “With any luck, Israel will take care of it, then we can then all turn around and blame Israel.”

That’s all, folks.

Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.