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Russia's political opposition has been put on notice. The Feb. 27 murder of prominent opposition leader Boris Nemtsov just steps from the Kremlin marks a dramatic escalation of the Russian regime's long-running war on its opponents. Nemtsov, after all, wasn't merely a dissenting politician. He was part of the old system, having served as a deputy prime minister in the government of President Boris Yeltsin in the late 1990s. Beginning in the early 2000s, Nemtsov had moved into the political opposition, emerging as a critic of Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, and his policies. Even so, his position as a member of Yeltsin's inner circle had given him a degree of immunity from official retribution.

On Tuesday in a much anticipated speech before joint session of Congress, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again sounded the warning against Iran's nuclear ambitions and called for "a better deal" than the nuclear agreement currently being negotiated.

Desperately pursuing a nuclear deal with Iran, scrapping old positions and offering new concessions at a mind-boggling pace, the Obama administration has lost sight of what this regime represents and why the United States and its allies have focused on its nuclear program to begin with.

What could the White House have been thinking? The Obama administration's recently concluded Summit on Countering Violent Extremism was a high-profile affair, bringing together key world leaders and decisionmakers on a critical topic at a critical time. But it was also punctuated by instances of stunning tone-deafness, and a profound failure to understand the dynamics of terrorism in its many forms.

To hear the White House tell it, our nagging Iranian problem might soon be a thing of the past. As the March deadline for nuclear negotiations nears, administration officials and sympathetic onlookers have become increasingly optimistic about an impending breakthrough with the Islamic Republic over its atomic ambitions.