Examines the legal statutes, executive orders, and judicial interpretations of US economic and financial sanctions.

Tracing the history of economic sanctions from the blockades of World War I to the policing of colonial empires and the interwar confrontation with fascism, Nicholas Mulder combines political, economic, legal, and military history to reveal how a coercive wartime tool was adopted as an instrument of peacekeeping by the League of Nations.This timely study casts an overdue light on why sanctions are widely considered a form of war, and why their unintended consequences are so tremendous.

Economic sanctions continue to play an important role in the response to terrorism, nuclear proliferation, military conflicts, and other foreign policy crises. But poor design and implementation of sanctions policies often mean that they fall short of their desired effects. This landmark study, first published in 1985, delves into the rich experience of sanctions in the 20th century to harvest lessons on how to use sanctions more effectively. This volume is the updated third edition of this widely cited study. It chronicles and examines 170 cases of economic sanctions imposed since World War I. Fifty of these cases were launched in the 1990s and are new to this edition. Special attention is paid to new developments arising from the end of the Cold War and increasing globalization of the world economy. Analyzing a range of economic and political factors that can influence the success of a sanctions episode, the authors distill a set of commandments to guide policymakers in the effective use of sanctions.

Economic sanctions are increasingly important instruments of regulatory and foreign policy. This book provides a detailed study of the post-9/11 financial sanctions programmes in the US and Europe, examining the key regulatory and legal issues that confront businesses and related liability issues for third parties and individuals.

The growing use of U.S. and multilateral economic sanctions--and the increasing and controversial attention such measures are attracting internationally--create a need for a detailed legal analysis of the subject and its policy implications for both U.S. practitioners and their counterparts in other countries. The expanding field of sanctions is especially worthy of close scrutiny as it generates significant (and often inadvertent) influence on finance and trade. Increasingly, lawyers and business people involved in international transactions must take account of the risks, both actual and potential, inherent in compliance with economic sanctions on trading partners. This major new work, a completely revised successor edition to the author's much-cited Economic Sanctions and U.S. Trade, shifts the main emphasis from the mechanics of applying foreign policy objectives to a careful and complete articulation of what those goals are or ought to be--an approach that leads inevitably to a concrete methodology for assessing the effectiveness of sanctions. In the process the book examines such salient characteristics of the current and developing sanctions regime as the following: the growing prominence of U.S. Congressionally-mandated sanctions programs; the complex interaction of economic sanctions and trade policy; and the marked increase in multilateral sanctions programs in which the U.S. is a participant. In-depth analysis of major U.S. sanctions programs (those imposed on Cuba, Libya, and Iraq, as well as several other lesser programs) presents numerous hypothetical but realistic international scenarios, demonstrating their working-out under the practical application of specific elements of each sanctions program.

Powerful countries like the United States regularly employ economic sanctions as a tool for promoting their foreign policy interests. Yet this foreign policy tool has an uninspiring track record of success, with economic sanctions achieving their goals less than a third of the time they are imposed. The costs of these failed sanctions policies can be significant for the states that impose them, their targets, and the other countries they affect. Explaining economic sanctions' high failure rate therefore constitutes a vital endeavor for academics and policy-makers alike. Busted Sanctions seeks to provide this explanation, and reveals that the primary cause of this failure is third-party spoilers, or sanctions busters, who undercut sanctioning efforts by providing their targets with extensive foreign aid or sanctions-busting trade. In quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing over 60 years of U.S. economic sanctions, Bryan Early reveals that both types of third-party sanctions busters have played a major role in undermining U.S. economic sanctions. Surprisingly, his analysis also reveals that the United States' closest allies are often its sanctions' worst enemies. The book offers the first comprehensive explanation for why different types of sanctions busting occur and reveals the devastating effects it has on economic sanctions' chances of success.