A one idea tugging along throughout the book is that the sanctions, now only one of two instruments of the US foreign policy, another being war must be better harmonized with the EU, otherwise they would backfire.
This view is not surprising given that Demarais was a French foreign service officer in charge of sanctions at the Embassy in Moscow. First, the American sanctions went the way of the Papal excommunications in the Late Middle Ages. Deadly efficient at first, they were applied so speciously and for the obvious benefit of particular papal families that, with time they completely lost their effectiveness being factored in an overall conduct of the European foreign policy.
But this is important that the subject of "sanctions" (in reality, economic warfare) started to be discussed. In fact, the Peace of Ausburg compact of 1555, appearing well before the birth of the modern nation-state in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, presumed that the "obstacles to lawful commerce" might constitute a casus belli. The destruction of the international system undertaken since early 1990s in favor of an unrestrained US domination, threw the international law back nearly 500 years.
