The chancellor of the exchequer and the IMF agree. Britain’s economy is about to take its greatest hit for decades. This is collateral damage from the US’s war on Iran and the closing of the strait of Hormuz – and will be made worse by sanctioning Gulf oil exports. Britain has already been weakened by four years of sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. Now its economic growth is to be crushed, its government’s popularity is plummeting and its prime minister may face removal.

This was what sanctions were supposed to do to the enemy, not to the UK. Their unprecedented severity was to teach Vladimir Putin the error of his ways. His friends were to plead with him to stop. Yet, in the years after sanctions took hold, Russia’s rate of economic growth was higher than Britain’s. Meanwhile, sanctions against Iran in the 2010s were meant to halt its nuclear programme. They appeared to encourage it. Now they are meant to undermine the Tehran regime and topple the ayatollahs. There seems to be little chance of that.

The US currently imposes economic sanctions on about 30 countries worldwide, often joined by other western governments. In addition to Iran, they include North Korea, Myanmar Belarus and Afghanistan. The one quality many of these states share is that they are still ruled by the same regimes as when sanctions were imposed; sanctions, in short, have not succeeded in destablising them.

Sanctions........

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