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Hello from London

This will be a week when the Bretton Woods conference of 1944 will be much in the air. The 80th anniversary is to be the theme of the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC. It also hangs over the summit this week of the “BRICS” countries, in Kazan in Russia’s Tatarstan Republic. As our new story explains, this event will give Vladimir Putin the chance to hobnob with other national leaders, and to pursue his idea of building an entirely new global payments system to attack one legacy of Bretton Woods—America’s dominance of global finance—and, he hopes, shield Russia and its pals from sanctions.

That sanctions are already a sometimes ineffective weapon is amply demonstrated by a remarkable report in the week’s issue by my colleague Matthieu Favas on how Iran finances its provocative foreign policy and the network of militias it uses to implement it. This enables Iran to thwart the straitjacket of financial and other sanctions in which America has tried to confine its regime.

Huge uncertainty remains over when and how Israel will retaliate for Iran’s big missile attack on October 1st. But there is virtually no doubt that it will indeed retaliate, raising the risk of another dangerous cycle of escalation, more than a year after the Hamas attacks on Isra...