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The Iranians have hired killers to threaten, scare, and attack Israeli and Jewish sites in Sweden and Denmark. Live grenades were found near the Israeli embassy in Stockholm, and grenades were actually thrown at the Israeli embassy in Copenhagen. The leading Israeli defense company Elbit had explosives go off at its offices both in Sweden (Gothenburg) and in Belgium (Brussels). Iran supplied to its criminal mercenaries a list of targets and what was to be done with them: kidnappings and murders of Israelis, attacks on Jewish community sites, grenade attacks on Israeli embassies and Israeli-owned businesses, and the killing of exiled Iran journalists. Quite a long list.

The Iranians, or their mercenaries, have been plotting to kill American officials. An Iranian plot to kill Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former Secretary of State, was foiled in time. Another former Trump official, former National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien, was tailed by two “Middle Eastern men” in Paris to his hotel, from which he later had to be “extracted by his security detail.” Were those who had been following him Iranians, or men hired by the Iranians? And were they intent on killing him, or only on threatening him?

Tehran’s agents managed to stab a dissident Iranian journalist in London. An enemy of the Tehran regime, the singer Shahin Najafi, almost died after an attack on her in Hannover, Germany.

Another Iranian plot was directed at killing John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019. Bolton has long been an outspoken hawk on the Islamic Republic. He is now under round-the-clock security. The government has offered a $20 million award for information leading to the arrest of an Iranian national, Shahram Poursafi, whom the American government believes tried to hire hitmen to kill Bolton. Poursafi is likely to now be safely back in Iran.

Hezbollah, and thus its puppet-master Iran, was responsible for the 1994 attack on the Argentinian Mutual Israelite Association (AMIA). Iran, through Hezbollah, was also responsible for the attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992. Alberto Nisman had investigated and uncovered incontrovertible evidence of Iran’s role in the AMIA attack. For that, he had to be killed.

All over Europe, and in North and South America, too, dissident Iranians and their non-Iranian supporters, and Jewish communal leaders having nothing to do with Iran, are known to be the targets of the Iranian regime, either directly using its own nationals, or employing members of Hezbollah, or even common criminals, whom it hires to carry out some of its political assassinations. The fatwa against Rushdie was ultimately carried out; he lost an eye, and almost died in the attack. In New York City, several attempts have been made to kill the anti-hijab activist Masih Alinejad, but have been foiled in time; she now requires a permanent security detail. In the Netherlands, an MP, Ulysses Ellian, received a threatening letter from Iran’s Embassy, counseling him to stop speaking out about Iran — or else. He made the letter public, and has not been cowed. But the government of the Netherlands has yet to take action against Iran’s Embassy by, for example, demanding that the author of the letter be expelled, or perhaps threatening to shut down Iran’s embassy in The Hague altogether, a move sure to get Iran’s attention.

Providing security details to those threatened with death by the Iranians should not be the only response. In any country where threats are made by Iranian diplomatic personnel, or carried out by Iranians or those in their pay, the response ought to be to cut off diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic. After a few such cut-offs, the Iranians are likely to stop their overseas plotting. And if that cutoff in diplomatic relations does not have the desired effect, then the next stop is to place crippling economic sanctions — ending all Iranian imports, for example, to whatever country has experienced an attack by Iranian agents on its soil. Iran’s economy is already collapsing; such sweeping measures, carried out by half-dozen of Iran’s most important trading partners in Europe, will topple it.