When the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) adopted sanctions against Iran and North Korea, it opted for ‘targeted sanctions’, supposed to be more effective and coherent with international norms than the devastating ‘comprehensive sanctions’ applied against Iraq in the 1990s. For most sanctions scholars, the shifts in UNSC sanctions practices from the 1990s to the 2000s reconciled them with UN norms, lowering the possibility of conflict. In contrast, this chapter claims that with the creation of a global ‘sanctions regime complex’, made of UNSC sanctions and unilateral sanctions, the UNSC’s institutional practice has blurred the boundary between targeted and comprehensive sanctions logics, weakening the normative clarity of UN norms. It also claims that the UNSC has not done so voluntarily, with various informal practices being responsible for this outcome. In particular, it claims that the coherence of UNSC targeted sanctions with other UN norms has been weakened through circulation of documents and experts from unilateral to multilateral bodies in charge of sanctions programs and implementation. Through a variety of processes, the authority of the UNSC over sanctions policy has diffused, and the authority of the UN system has been taken over by states imposing the harshest sanctions, in particular the USA.