Book Review: The Great Sanctions Hack by Urjit Patel

Srinath Sridharan

There was a time when wars were fought with tanks and treaties. In our century, as Dr. Urjit Patel writes in The Great Sanctions Hack, conflict has moved to the sphere of capital accounts and correspondent banking lines. Sanctions, once seen as moral censure short of war, have mutated into an ecosystem of economic coercion. The United States remains its unrivalled architect, but their reach extends far beyond adversaries — rippling across supply chains, currencies, and development projects.

The book opens with rare candour preface for a former central banker — where Patel admits that before 2022 he had paid “about as much attention to sanctions as to news of meteor showers.” It sets the tone for what follows: an insider’s awakening to how a peripheral policy concern has become central to the world’s economic weather.

Patel, former RBI Governor and now India’s Executive Director at the IMF, writes without the rhetoric of diplomacy. His prose is austere, his logic surgical and calculations and formulae presented in the book technical. 

But the warning embedded in these pages is clear: sanctions are a form of siege warfare — slow, invisible, and often self-wounding. The damage they cause is cumulative, not instantaneous. Economies don’t collapse overnight; they ‘asphyxiate’ over time, through constricted trade, blocked finance, and the chilling effect of fear. The book distils and expands on Patel’s recent research paper, “Asphyxiation by Sanctions,”  a dense, data-driven analysis into a lucid narrative accessible to a wider public.

Every emerging economy and policymaker now operates under the shadow of opaque sanctions regimes. This is as much about modern finance as it is about power.

Patel begins by identifying the incongruities in how sanctions are discussed, before advancing a systems-based view connecting economic harm, policy lags, and ‘sanctions hysteresis.’ Through case studies from Iran and Belarus, he tests these ideas against real data, showing how successive waves of restrictions alter a nation’s strategic behaviour.

Midway, the book turns to the multilateral stage, indicting institutions such as the G20, IMF and World Bank for their studied opacity on the welfare costs of sanctions and their spillovers. The book argues persuasively that these institutions — which should serve as neutral stewards of global order — have often failed to fairly assess the consequences of sanctions or to guide international economic policy with balance and transparency. 

The later chapters widen the lens further — to the geopolitics of currency, examining China’s renminbi project and its quiet positioning as a ‘white knight’ for economies caught in the Western sanctions net. The book closes with a sober reflection on what this evolving order portends for global finance and economic sovereignty.

The Mathematics of Fear

Patel’s analysis dismantles several comfortable myths. The first is that sanctions work. Citing global academic data, he notes that fewer than one in five sanctions imposed since 2000 have achieved their stated goals. 

Yet their use has multiplied — suggesting that benefits extend beyond diplomacy, conferring moral high ground and even commercial advantage. In Patel’s view, these “externalities” — from market capture to deterrence — distort the cost-benefit calculus. The sanctioner internalises the gains while exporting the losses to others.

This is where Patel introduces his most significant idea: the need to rethink how we measure the “payoff” from sanctions. Instead of the binary logic of success or failure, he argues for a more granular, time-bound evaluation that accounts for collateral damage. Economic harm, he reminds us, unfolds through lags — in output, trade, credit ratings, and human development indicators. Without such a framework, sanctions are evaluated through political emotion rather than economic fact.

He also questions the silence of international institutions that claim to monitor global economic stability. The IMF, the World Bank, and even the G20, Patel argues, have shown remarkable restraint — or perhaps reluctance — in quantifying the welfare costs of sanctions and their spillovers.

Patel lifts the veil on the hidden architecture of economic warfare: a lattice of cross-border banking, compliance algorithms, and risk models that transmit fear faster than policy. The result is a self-reinforcing loop where anticipation curtails commerce and uncertainty taxes growth. For smaller economies, the result is paralysis by caution — a hesitancy that no trade agreement or diplomatic assurance can fully offset.

Lessons for an Emerging Power

Patel’s narrative situates India within this fraught global geometry. As the world’s fourth-largest economy with deepening trade and energy ties to sanctioned countries, India’s exposure is no longer theoretical. 

Patel’s tone is not alarmist, but his implications are sobering. He warns that the very architecture that allows economic coercion to be weaponised — the dominance of the dollar, the extraterritorial reach of American law, and the compliance regimes of Western finance — could one day constrain India’s own sovereignty. As nations explore de-dollarisation and alternative financial architectures through BRICS or regional banks, Patel views these as rational acts of self-preservation rather than rebellion. Economic autonomy, he implies, will increasingly depend on how nations design buffers against sanctions risk.

At its heart, The Great Sanctions Hack is a look on power — how it is exercised through money, and how fear becomes policy. Patel’s prose avoids polemic; instead, he exposes the quiet dysfunction at the core of the global order, where moral justifications mask mercantilist impulses.

Yet one wishes that Patel, as an economist and former central bank head, had also turned his gaze to the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of these forces — offering deeper commentary. His lived experience could have lent a human and strategic richness to the elegant formulae that frame his argument. 

Deceptively slim yet formidable, The Great Sanctions Hack is, in the end, a compelling reflection for anyone who follows geopolitics, geoeconomics, monetary policy, global finance or public policy.