My Very Grumpy Book Review

An airing of book review grievances

Yeah, that cat gets me. Photo by Shahmie Mahmoud on Unsplash

Hey, remember earlier this week, when I suggested that everyone was at their breaking point?! That is a theme that seems to have resonated with some folks,¹ though not perhaps the way that I intended.

Well, full disclosure: I too might be at my breaking point. It’s the end of the term, which means a lot of grading, a lot of administrative responsibilities that I neglected for months must be addressed by the end of the calendar year, and a surprising number of meetings that require my attendance. Like any academic, I want to get all this work done so I can do my real work — the painstaking scholarship that will stand the test of time, no matter what Tom Oatley says!

All of this is to say that I’m in a real grumpy mood. So it’s the perfect time to pass along my latest book review.

I participated in the H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Agathe Demarais' Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests. The other contributors were the Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford and Syracuse University’s Daniel McDowell. You can access Bruce Jentleson’s introduction here, my review here, Ashford’s here, McDowell’s here, and Demarais’ response here. The whole shebang is available as a .pdf here.

Demarais did not respond to my review, and I cannot say as I blame her, because — and this is where my grumpiness comes in — I was not the biggest fan of her book:

The need has never been greater for a book to zoom out, map the current sanctions terrain, and assess the strategic pros and cons of all this economic statecraft. With Backfire, Agathe Demarais, who worked for the French Treasury as a sanctions advisor on Russia and Lebanon before moving onto the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and becoming its global forecasting director, attempts to provide a coherent state of play characterizing US sanctioning activity and its myriad downsides. The result is something of a muddle, however. Demarais claims in the preface that “this book is not for or against sanctions (xii)” but declares in the conclusion that “the time of peak US sanctions has passed (200).” The bulk of the pages in between are dedicated to the proposition that the US has abused the sanctions tool to the point where it has alienated allies and adversaries alike….

For those who are looking for a primer on the recent trend of US economic statecraft, Backfire will provide some juicy tidbits about the current state of play. For those who need a primer on the state of economic sanctions, however, Bruce Jentleson’s Sanctions is the better bet.

You’ll have to read the whole thing to see my issues with Backfire. Some of them are not Demarais’ fault. Since this book was first published (November 2022), an awful lot has happened, rendering some of her analysis overtaken by events.

This leads to my second grumpy thought. My review of Demarais’ Backfire is also pretty dated. I know this because I sent my essay in more than eighteen months ago. That is an awfully long time for a book review of a topical subject to sit on the shelf. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has no idea why the process of releasing these reviews too so bloody long, but I know it was long enough for me to ponder just publishing my own essay here so that it would be out in the ether. So I am glad to see that it has been published.

If you are interested in economic statecraft, I recommend reading everyone’s take — including Backfire itself, which is a great entryway to thinking about this topics. And the hard-working staff here promises to be in a better mood for the next newsletter.

1. That includes Slate’s Fred Kaplan, who generously cited me and expanded upon this notion in his latest essay