International economic sanctions keep increasing their popularity, but empirical studies show that sanctions rarely persuade targeted countries to change their policies. If sanctions are ineffective, why do policy makers persist in using them? This paradox has led many scholars to argue that rather than being foreign policy oriented, sanctions have more to do with domestic politics or symbolism. Building on an alternative idea of sanctions as the visible part of a larger, more complicated interaction, this study proposes a bargaining theory that explains the sanctions puzzle. First, senders...