Donald Trump’s sanctions in the Middle East have had little effect

PERHAPS HE SHOULD have done a bit more shopping on his last trip to New York. Last autumn Gebran Bassil, the head of a Christian party in Lebanon, was his country’s foreign minister and aspired to be its next president. On a trip to America in September he visited West Point, a military college, where he decried the corruption that has bankrupted Lebanon. Mr Bassil may be unable to return—because America has blacklisted him for his own alleged corruption.The sanctions announced on November 6th against Mr Bassil were Donald Trump’s highest-profile move against a Lebanese politician. Yet it is not clear what his administration hoped it would achieve, beyond complicating efforts to form a new Lebanese government in the aftermath of the huge explosion at Beirut’s port in August. Officials have offered contradictory rationales for the move, which illustrates the incoherence in America’s sanctions-heavy foreign policy.