Nick Fountain

planned or hoped.

Yar says, here is a twist in the story of these successful sanctions he spent so much time thinking about.

A little nuance.

See, U.S.

officials had just spent years pressuring banks all over the world to stop dealing with Iranian institutions for fear of funding terrorism.

And they were so convincing that they'd created a culture of overcompliance.

This chief legal officer at HSBC, a former U.S.

sanctions official himself, was saying, nah, no thank you.

His bank and probably also his peers were not going to jump back into Iran.

The U.S.

just spent years telling all of the banks how dangerous it is to do business there.

We are a private bank and we will make our own private decisions about the risks.

Yar says the banks have been so well-trained to steer very clear of the risk.

And there is this other really big flaw with sanctions in Iran.

And this one is almost always true of sanctions.

And it is that sanctions actually benefit some people in the sanctioned country.

So in Iran, the Islamic Republic, the people in charge, they may not even mind the sanctions that much.

Namely, there's this sort of parallel military in Iran that answers to the Ayatollah called the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or IRGC.

It's also like a company.

And the IRGC has benefited from the lack of international competition.