Agathe Demarais was a treasury official in the French government working in Moscow and Beirut when she saw, first hand, some of the unintended impacts of US sanctions. Agathe Demarais is the global forecasting director of the Economist Intelligence Unit and author of the new book Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against US Interests. The book makes the provocative argument that an over-reliance on sanctions as a tool US foreign policy is making sanctions a less effective tool of US foreign policy.

In our conversation, Agathe Demarais explains how US sanctions are sort of like antibiotics in which overuse can cause resistance.