You're sanctioned!

摘要

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.