Amir Sairafi was an Iranian trader doing business in Dubai, the free-wheeling Middle East commerce hub. When he flew to Germany to take his oral exams for his master s degree, he ran into the U.S. crackdown on illicit trade with Iran.

Analysts and pundits have spent the past two weeks puzzling over the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington, in part because of a complete lack of either motive or benefit for the Islamic Republic. Iran, reputed to place much stock in cost-benefit analyses of its geopolitical calculations, clearly fails to gain materially or politically from any part of the allegations thus far. So what gives?