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What Everyone Needs to Know
Sanctions: What Everyone Needs to Know®
A concise, authoritative overview of a little-understood yet extremely important phenomenon in world the use of economic sanctions by one country to punish another.
It's hard to browse the news without seeing reports of yet another imposition of sanctions by one country on another. The United States has sanctions against more than 30 countries. Russia has repeatedly imposed sanctions against former Soviet republics. China has developed its own approach, including targeting private entities such as the NBA. And it's not just major Japan and South Korea have sanctioned each other over WWII and colonial legacies; Saudi Arabia against Qatar because of differences over Iran; and France, Germany, and Norway against Brazil over the Amazon forest and climate change. In What Everyone Needs to Know®, Bruce Jentleson--one of America's leading scholars on the subject--answers the fundamental questions about sanctions Why are they used so much? What are their varieties? What are the key factors affecting their success? Why have they become the tool of first resort for states engaged in international conflict? Jentleson demonstrates that examining sanctions is key to understanding international relations and explains how and why they will likely continue to bear on global politics.
It's hard to browse the news without seeing reports of yet another imposition of sanctions by one country on another. The United States has sanctions against more than 30 countries. Russia has repeatedly imposed sanctions against former Soviet republics. China has developed its own approach, including targeting private entities such as the NBA. And it's not just major Japan and South Korea have sanctioned each other over WWII and colonial legacies; Saudi Arabia against Qatar because of differences over Iran; and France, Germany, and Norway against Brazil over the Amazon forest and climate change. In What Everyone Needs to Know®, Bruce Jentleson--one of America's leading scholars on the subject--answers the fundamental questions about sanctions Why are they used so much? What are their varieties? What are the key factors affecting their success? Why have they become the tool of first resort for states engaged in international conflict? Jentleson demonstrates that examining sanctions is key to understanding international relations and explains how and why they will likely continue to bear on global politics.
288 pages, Paperback
Published September 27, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 7, 2026
Good primer on sanctions. Combination of academic literature, policy and case studies. Accessible.
Quotes:
Which Metrics Best Measure Success?
some success is inherent in the very imposition of costs. (…) Five additional factors have to be wrestled with in measuring sanctions success: degrees of success, net assessment, relativity to other policy options, timeframe for assessment, and false positives/ false negatives.
No single factor explains sanctions success or failure. We can, though, establish patterns and tendencies that provide some theoretical framework and policy parameters. Summing up:
* Economic impact, actual or the credible threat thereof, is necessary but not sufficient for sanctions success, often leaving a high economic impact-low policy compliance gap.
* Military superiority and military force do not consistently add to sanctions success.
* Reciprocal diplomacy linking sanctions and inducements is more effective than sanctions on their own.
* Regime type differences between democracies and non-democracies show some tendencies but no set patter of either relative vulnerability as sanctions targets or relative effectiveness as sanctions senders.
* Multilateral sanctions have some advantages over unilateral ones, although with their own constraints.
* Smart sanctions have a mixed record, financial sanctions included.
* Limited objectives are more achievable than extensive ones for reasons of ends-means proportionality and balance of interests.
Cases per country:
US: Sanctions are very much part of the American modus operandi. (…) Sanctions are being overused.
China: China continues to say one thing and do another. "The position of the Chinese government," a top official stated in criticizing US-led sanctions against Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine,
"is that we believe that sanctions have never been a fundamental and effective way to solve problems, and China always opposes any illegal unilateral sanctions." Yet in case after case, it has imposed its own unilateral sanctions.
UN: The main advantages of UN sanctions are their normative legitimacy, international legal status, and lessening of alternative trade partners. Even with its flaws, the UN still carries more normative legitimacy globally than any other actor. Naming and shaming an offender is more effective when done by the full international community than if just by individual nation or coalition of nations. When UN sanctions are mandatory, all member countries are legally required to comply. These make it more difficult for sanctions target states to find alternative trade partners and geopolitical protection.
Quotes:
Which Metrics Best Measure Success?
some success is inherent in the very imposition of costs. (…) Five additional factors have to be wrestled with in measuring sanctions success: degrees of success, net assessment, relativity to other policy options, timeframe for assessment, and false positives/ false negatives.
No single factor explains sanctions success or failure. We can, though, establish patterns and tendencies that provide some theoretical framework and policy parameters. Summing up:
* Economic impact, actual or the credible threat thereof, is necessary but not sufficient for sanctions success, often leaving a high economic impact-low policy compliance gap.
* Military superiority and military force do not consistently add to sanctions success.
* Reciprocal diplomacy linking sanctions and inducements is more effective than sanctions on their own.
* Regime type differences between democracies and non-democracies show some tendencies but no set patter of either relative vulnerability as sanctions targets or relative effectiveness as sanctions senders.
* Multilateral sanctions have some advantages over unilateral ones, although with their own constraints.
* Smart sanctions have a mixed record, financial sanctions included.
* Limited objectives are more achievable than extensive ones for reasons of ends-means proportionality and balance of interests.
Cases per country:
US: Sanctions are very much part of the American modus operandi. (…) Sanctions are being overused.
China: China continues to say one thing and do another. "The position of the Chinese government," a top official stated in criticizing US-led sanctions against Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine,
"is that we believe that sanctions have never been a fundamental and effective way to solve problems, and China always opposes any illegal unilateral sanctions." Yet in case after case, it has imposed its own unilateral sanctions.
UN: The main advantages of UN sanctions are their normative legitimacy, international legal status, and lessening of alternative trade partners. Even with its flaws, the UN still carries more normative legitimacy globally than any other actor. Naming and shaming an offender is more effective when done by the full international community than if just by individual nation or coalition of nations. When UN sanctions are mandatory, all member countries are legally required to comply. These make it more difficult for sanctions target states to find alternative trade partners and geopolitical protection.
March 30, 2026
Congressional legislation needs to be passed to prevent Peter Lerman from reading audiobooks. Monotone exhaustive technical analysis of sanctions.
This book would probably be good to have a physical copy to flip through as needed if you were involved in sanctions policy making but otherwise I’d avoid.
This book would probably be good to have a physical copy to flip through as needed if you were involved in sanctions policy making but otherwise I’d avoid.
February 9, 2026
The multiple cases were extremely helpful, but I felt like I was constantly looking up definitions of different terms during the case analysis. Defining and redefining sanction types would have been helpful.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews