Gormley: Sanctions feel good … but they don't work particularly well

It is only natural that as Russia attacks other countries’ borders and elections, and Myanmar brutalizes an ethnic minority and North Korea terrorizes the world, there will be demands to do whatever thing makes us feel less utterly powerless. The demand is often for sanctions — to keep them, to multiply them, to reintroduce them.
But any call for sanctions, however insistent, will necessarily be weak.
Sanctions depend first on an improbable proposition: That multiple states will deci