“THE Dog returns to its Vomit, and the Sow returns to her Mire/ And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.” Kipling was right.

Do any of Britain's leaders really think further economic sanctions will stop Iran's nuclear programme? I cannot believe it. Sanctions did not topple Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic or Muammar Gaddafi; they led merely to war. Sanctions have been imposed on Iran for 33 years because there was nothing else to do. They have done no good and almost certainly been counterproductive in reinforcing autocracy.

Washington has announced new commercial and financial sanctions on Iran, blacklisting anyone who does business with it. With an election in the offing, President Obama must show America's pro-Israel lobby that he is tough somewhere in the Middle East. The EU must this month decide whether to collude with the US in this dangerous game and ban Iran's oil exports. The threat was enough to get Tehran to test medium-range missiles in the Gulf, and its wilder heads to murmur about closing the Straits of Hormuz, thus blocking a third of the world's sea-borne oil.

This sabre-rattling — in the midst of a recession — is beyond stupid. No one has seriously doubted that Iran's government, surrounded by nuclear-armed or nuclear-allied powers, would one day seek a similar capability. It is the nature of well-resourced and insecure regimes to find comfort in “the ultimate weapon”. It seems of no account that no war fought by a nuclear power has seen such a weapon even threatened. It was not a factor in Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, the Caucasus, Kashmir or numerous Middle East conflicts. The one time such weapons were “on the table” was over Cuba in 1962 — and then they probably helped prevent war.

Any fool may say, you cannot be too careful. It is the motto of the arms race. Israel has a nuclear capability for that reason, and that is why Iran wants one. A pre-emptive Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear plants might postpone their work, but make eventual war more likely. I would prefer it if Iran had no such missiles, but that is hardly for Britain to say when it demands 'the right' to its own. In this case, what matters is the avoidance of escalation, of the megaphone belligerence that makes some western leaders vulnerable to the 'inevitability' of war. — The Guardian, London