Sanctions are one of the most common tools states use to pressure one another without resorting to military force, yet they often fail to produce meaningful concessions. That tension is the central puzzle Daniel Drezner takes up in The Sanctions Paradox. If sanctions so often seem ineffective, why do states keep using them? Drezner builds on David Baldwin’s Economic Statecraft, which challenged the field’s tendency to dismiss economic coercion by arguing that scholars were measuring “success” too narrowly. This piece examines that theory, the statistical evidence behind it, and Drezner’s case study of Russian coercion in the former Soviet space.
Drezner’s main argument starts with a simple observation. How much a sanction hurts is not what determines whether the sanction works effectively. What matters more is what the target of the sanction expects to happen next. Picture two countries that expect to keep clashing for years to come. If the target gives in now, it’s not just a one-time loss. It hands the other side leverage it can use again later, and it looks weak in the process. So, the target holds out, even when the sanctions are genuinely painful. Drezner calls this the conflict expectations model, and it produces a real paradox. Countries sanction their enemies far more often than their friends yet get fewer results from it.
Sanctioning a friend is rarer, but far more likely to work. Cost still plays a role, just not the only one. The more a sanction hurts the target, the more pressure it feels to concede. The more it costs the country imposing the sanction to keep it up, the more pressure that country feels to back down. Drezner calls this tug-of-war the costs of deadlock. But when two countries expect to be rivals for a long time, that calculation gets overridden entirely. This is why Drezner argues that power isn’t just about GDP or military size. It depends on the relationship between the two countries, and can even shift from one issue to the next.
Drezner backs this up with the statistical record before turning to a single case in depth. Looking across a large number of sanctions episodes, he finds that countries usually only imposed sanctions when the target stood to suffer as much as they did. Allies gave in more readily. Adversaries dug in and offered fewer concessions. Overall, economic cost and the expectation of future conflict predicted outcomes more reliably than raw military or economic power. To test this pattern in depth, Drezner turns to Russia’s coercion of the former Soviet republics from 1992 through 1997, a useful case precisely because Russia was more dominant than any of these states, yet the outcomes still varied significantly, suggesting that raw power alone could not explain the results. Belarus was highly dependent on Russian trade, energy, credit, and security support and generally viewed Russia as an ally, so it made major concessions on nuclear weapons, military bases, and strategic industries. Kazakhstan similarly conceded on nuclear weapons but resisted dual citizenship and autonomy for ethnic Russians, since those concessions could create future Russian leverage over its territorial integrity. This shows that conflict expectations could vary even within a single country, shifting from one issue to the next.
Ukraine, on the other hand, presents the opposite pattern. While the country was highly dependent on Russian energy and trade, it viewed Russia as a future security threat. Russia pressured Ukraine over nuclear weapons, Soviet assets, the Black Sea Fleet, Sevastopol, and other strategic industries. Ukraine made moderate concessions but resisted exclusive Russian control and demanded compensation, debt relief, and recognition of Ukrainian sovereignty. It also had some counter leverage because Russian gas exports to Europe traveled through Ukrainian pipelines. Economic costs pushed Ukraine toward compromise, but conflict expectations limited how much it was willing to surrender.
Drezner’s comparison of the 39 Russian coercion cases gives some of his strongest evidence. Allied countries made major concessions in 73.3 percent of cases, compared with only 16.7 percent for adversaries. When moderate concessions are included, every allied case produced at least some meaningful success, while only 37.5 percent of adversarial cases did. His statistical analysis also finds that the absence of expected future conflict was the strongest predictor of concession size. The Boolean analysis reaches a similar conclusion: major concessions were most likely when the target was a Russian ally and Russia relied on economic pressure without adding military threats. This directly supports Drezner’s argument that expectations of future conflict help explain why similar economic pressure can lead to very different outcomes.
Drezner’s analytical perspective remains fruitful for policymakers and academics alike, because it explains why economic pressure works in some relationships and fails completely in others. His model gives a clear answer. Sanctions struggle when states expect a long fight ahead, because giving in now means handing a rival leverage it can use for years. When the future still looks cooperative, though, compromises become much easier. This is playing out in real time. Western sanctions have imposed real costs1 on Russia’s economy since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, yet Moscow has made no meaningful concessions, exactly what Drezner’s model predicts for two states that expect their conflict to continue rather than resolve. That is what makes his book useful today. It was never really a history of the 1990s. It is a framework for reading today’s sanctions before they play out.