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Opening comments—like opening questions—strengthen the link with the preceding paragraph.

Austria, Finland, and Sweden have joined the club. The new members will do no more than tilt the map of Europe a bit to the north and east, but that is proving enough to make those on the southern fringes feel uneasy. They are worried that their concerns will seem relatively unimportant to the northern majority. In particular they fret about North Africa.
     With good reason. The Christmas hijacking of an Air France jet by Islamic extremists served as a grim reminder to the French that their former colony, Algeria, is fighting a civil war that may well spill over into France and prompt an exodus of refugees across the Mediterranean. Like France, Spain and Italy already receive a steady flow of illegal immigrants from North Africa, where poverty and fecundity combine to make the adventurous seek a better life in Europe.

Sanctions have recently come to seem the tool of choice in foreign policy. During the cold war, the big task of containing communism was done mainly with tanks and nukes: from 1945 until the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, America imposed sanctions less than once a year on average. Now, deprived of a single overarching threat, Americans worry about a range of lesser ones. Few warrant the use of force; all exercise some Washington constituency enough to generate pressure for action. And so, on Mr. Eizenstat's count, America resorted to sanctions 61 times between 1993 and 1996—a frequency 15 times greater than during the cold war.
     Up to a point, this is fine. In the past, western sanctions risked driving private countries into the arms of the Soviet Bloc; these days, Russia can be persuaded to go along with sanctions on pariahs like Iraq, so they are more effective. But the rise of sanctions also reflects troubling trends.

The comments—With good reason and Up to a point, this is fine—could have been made at the end of the first paragraph, but that would have broken the link with the second.

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