Thirty years of research suggest sanctions rarely change the behaviour they target. Western governments keep imposing them anyway.
On February 19, 2022, Kamala Harris stood before the Munich Security Conference and delivered a warning. “If Russia further invades Ukraine,” she said, “the United States, together with our Allies and partners, will impose significant and unprecedented economic costs.” The phrasing was careful in its escalation (“further invades,” as though the existing occupation of Crimea and parts of the Donbas were a footnote), but the instrument itself was announced without qualification: significant, unprecedented. The phrase “allies and partners” made the coalition scope plain: Harris was promising coordinated economic warfare on a scale not previously attempted against a G20 economy.
Five days later Russia invaded, and the sanctions followed. By most technical measures they were significant: immobilising roughly $300 billion in Russian central bank reserves, cutting seven major Russian banks off from SWIFT, a G7-led oil price cap, extensive technology export controls and, from December 2023, US secondary sanctions threatening any foreign bank that serves Russia’s military-industrial base — the most ambitious use of that tool since the Iran campaigns of the Obama era. By late 2022, over forty countries had imposed some form of economic measure on Russia, and by July 2026 the EU had adopted twenty-one sanctions packages.
Russia neither withdrew nor changed its strategic calculus in any measurable way, and by 2024 the war had settled into the grinding territorial attrition it has remained ever since.
None of this surprises researchers who study sanctions for a living. Thirty years of research have produced an unflattering record, still argued over in its details, and that record has been on the desks of foreign policy establishments for most of that time. Yet the gap between what the literature finds and how sanctions are publicly justified, as instruments of coercion that change the behaviour of sovereign states, has if anything widened. The Munich speech followed a template, and that raises a more interesting question than whether the Russia sanctions worked: why do governments keep reaching for an instrument as if it works in the way they claim?
The Theory of the Instrument
The term “sanctions” covers three distinct mechanisms that share a political vocabulary but differ substantially in their causal logic.
Comprehensive sanctions are trade embargoes — measures affecting all or most commerce with a target state. The US embargo on Cuba, in place since 1962 and codified through the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, is the paradigm case. The theory of change is direct: deny the target economy sufficient trade that it contracts, producing hardship broad enough to force the government to alter its behaviour or collapse. The instrument has historical roots in the League of Nations’ attempt to discipline Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, an early and instructive failure: oil was not included in the embargo, and the measure was lifted within eight months.
Targeted sanctions, sometimes called “smart” sanctions, operate differently. Rather than restricting the target economy as a whole, they direct pressure at specific individuals and entities: travel bans, asset freezes, restrictions on named companies. The theory of change is surgical: sanction the decision-makers rather than their populations, avoiding the humanitarian damage of comprehensive measures while concentrating pressure on the people with actual authority to change policy. The turn toward targeted sanctions is usually traced to a series of government-sponsored expert reviews in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Interlaken, Bonn-Berlin and Stockholm processes, which emerged from an acknowledgment that comprehensive sanctions had produced widespread civilian harm in Iraq and Haiti without generating the political results their architects claimed. The “smart sanctions” turn amounted to a tacit admission that the original instrument had structural problems that better targeting might partially address.
Secondary sanctions occupy a different legal and political category altogether. They are not directed at the primary target but at third-country entities that continue to do business with the designated state. The mechanism that gives secondary sanctions their reach is the dollar-clearing system: because the dollar dominates trade invoicing everywhere except Europe (roughly three-quarters or more of export invoicing in every other region, averaged over the two decades to 2019) and because most dollar payments ultimately clear through US correspondent banks, the US Treasury can threaten to cut off any financial institution anywhere in the world from dollar-clearing access if it processes transactions involving sanctioned entities. The legal basis for the dollar leg, that a payment clearing through a US bank falls under US jurisdiction, is conventional. What is contested in international law, and has proved practically unchallengeable, is the further step: punishing foreign banks for business that never touches the United States at all.
The UN Security Council provides the formal multilateral framework for sanctions under Article 41 of the Charter, which lets the Council impose measures “not involving the use of armed force” to give effect to its decisions on maintaining or restoring international peace and security. UN Security Council sanctions carry binding force under international law and cannot be legally circumvented by member states. US and EU unilateral measures bind everyone within their own jurisdiction: their citizens and companies wherever they operate, anyone acting on their territory and, in some US programmes, even foreign subsidiaries owned or controlled by US companies. Beyond that they have no force in international law, so their reach abroad depends on pressure — third parties face a choice between the US or EU financial system and whatever benefits the sanctioned relationship provides.
The dollar-clearing chokepoint
Secondary sanctions derive their extraterritorial power from one architectural fact above all: the US dollar is the world's dominant reserve and settlement currency, and most dollar transactions ultimately clear through the US financial system. Any bank in any jurisdiction that processes a dollar payment on behalf of a sanctioned entity risks losing access to US correspondent banking, and with it the ability to clear any dollar transaction globally. For most institutions, losing dollar-clearing access is an existential threat, which means the US Treasury can apply binding financial pressure on foreign banks without any formal legal authority over them. Nor does the reach stop at the dollar: since December 2023, OFAC has made clear that its Russia secondary-sanctions authority covers foreign banks' transactions in any currency.
The EU's objection to this architecture is codified in its Blocking Statute, first adopted in 1996 and updated in 2018 to cover Iran-related US secondary sanctions. The statute prohibits EU operators from complying with certain extraterritorial US measures and theoretically allows EU persons to recover in EU courts damages arising from non-compliance penalties. In practice, the statute has been ineffective: EU companies with international banking relationships, faced with a choice between those relationships and trade with Iran, have overwhelmingly chosen to exit Iran, because the Iranian market was worth less to them than the risk to everything else.The Record — What the Numbers Say and What They Don’t
Gary Clyde Hufbauer and his co-authors produced the foundational study in sanctions research, now in its third edition. Across 204 sanctions episodes from 1914 to 2000, they found a success rate of approximately 34 percent: in roughly one-third of cases, sanctions contributed to at least partial achievement of their stated objectives. For a political instrument routinely dismissed as ineffective, that might sound almost encouraging.
Robert Pape’s 1997 challenge took aim at the same one-in-three figure as it appeared in the 1990 second edition, which counted 40 successes among 115 cases. Working through those claimed successes, Pape argued that many were episodes in which military force, not sanctions, had done the coercing: cases where sanctions happened to be imposed alongside military operations or credible military threats that drove compliance. Once those and other miscodings were stripped out, only five clear successes remained: a success rate of under 5 percent. The gap between 34 percent and 5 percent is a dispute about whether the instrument works at all. The Hufbauer figure is frequently cited in policy justification; the Pape figure essentially never appears in a speech by a foreign minister.
The larger Global Sanctions Data Base, which now holds 1,794 cases covering 1950 to 2025, gave a similar picture when its builders first summarised an earlier release in 2021: aggregate success rates in the 30 to 50 percent range depending on objective type and coding criteria. But the aggregate figure obscures the more important finding: effectiveness varies dramatically by what the sanctions are trying to achieve. Sanctions targeting trade practices, modest policy adjustments, or specific regulatory behaviour perform substantially better than the aggregate suggests. Sanctions targeting regime change, nuclear weapons program elimination, or territorial concession perform substantially worse. The cases that generate political demand for sanctions (nuclear programs, invasions, genocide, authoritarian consolidation) are the ones where the record is worst.
When we say sanctions usually don’t work, we mean they usually don’t achieve consequential political objectives when the target resists. Even on Hufbauer’s own coding, the one-in-three average hides a spread: modest policy goals succeed close to half the time, regime change and democratisation markedly less often, and those high-stakes codings are the ones Pape’s critique hits hardest.
The Hufbauer/Pape methodological dispute
The core of the dispute is how Hufbauer and his co-authors coded cases for success and which cases they included. Pape sorted the 40 claimed successes into four classes of error: 18 cases, he argued, were decided by force rather than sanctions; in 8 the target never conceded; 6 were trade disputes rather than economic sanctions in the coercive sense; and 3 were indeterminate. That left five clear successes, three of them, by his account, over trivial issues such as embassy locations or the release of a handful of prisoners.
Kimberly Ann Elliott, one of the study's authors, replied in 1998 that Pape had misread its aim: the study asked whether sanctions contributed to outcomes, not whether they alone caused them. Pape answered that his conclusion stood. If Pape is even partially right, the policy record is considerably more dispiriting than "one-third effectiveness". The 5 percent figure may itself be too low, since Pape's restriction to independent sanctions effect is arguably too demanding, but the directional implication of his analysis has not been convincingly refuted.Why the Theory Fails — Link by Link
The causal chain that sanctions theory requires has three links: economic pain reaches the target; that pain translates into domestic political pressure for change; and that political pressure translates into policy concession. Each link has structural problems, and the second is the weakest, yet the theory requires all three to hold at once.
The first link, that sanctions produce real economic pain, is the one the empirical literature most readily supports, though the picture is more complicated than it appears. For comprehensive sanctions to generate coercive pain, the sanctioning coalition must represent a significant share of the target’s trade and the target must lack viable alternatives. This condition has become progressively harder to satisfy as global trade has diversified and as sanctioned states have learned, over decades of exposure to US sanctions policy, to cultivate relationships with non-participating economies. Russia after February 2022 is the real test case. Russia did not escape unharmed, and the costs are documented: higher transaction costs from the exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT, oil revenue impacts from the G7 price cap (Russia was selling oil to China, India and Turkey at discounts that reduced government revenue), meaningful technology denial in aerospace and military electronics affecting both the civilian economy and military-industrial production, and early severe ruble volatility that required emergency interest rate action by the Russian central bank. But these costs did not produce the coercive effect. Russia absorbed them, re-routed trade through Turkey, the UAE, China and India, and restructured its economy around war production without the pain translating into political pressure for change.
That translation failure defines the second link, which is where the chain most consistently breaks. Study after study finds that sanctions worsen living conditions in target countries, from per capita income to poverty and mortality, often lastingly: 30 of the 31 studies in the fullest review. The burden falls unevenly. Governing elites, the people who could change policy, have foreign assets, parallel import channels, access to shadow financial networks, and control over the distribution mechanisms that determine who gets what inside a sanctions-constrained economy. Ordinary populations do not have these things. They absorb the costs that the instrument is theoretically designed to redirect upward toward decision-makers.
The political consequence runs in the opposite direction from what the theory predicts. Governments facing external economic pressure redirect that pain domestically as a narrative of foreign aggression — sanctions become evidence of hostile intent. Across authoritarian regimes between 2003 and 2015, sanctions significantly increased pro-government rallies, an effect amplified where the state controls the media. However many of those crowds are organised rather than spontaneous, the people who might otherwise constitute a domestic political constituency for compliance are, in practice, marshalled behind the government by the experience of being economically attacked by foreign powers. There is a further structural problem: sanctions fail to instigate democratisation when target regimes have strong legitimacy claims and few economic and social ties to the sender, and such regimes fold the sanctions themselves into those claims.
The third link, that political pressure would produce concession even if it somehow reached decision-makers, has its own structural problem independent of the first two. For a government to concede to sanctions pressure, the cost of continued refusal must exceed the cost of giving in. In the cases that generate the most sustained sanctions campaigns, over nuclear programs, territorial claims or regime survival, the thing demanded is the thing the government has determined is non-negotiable. Asking Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, or North Korea to dismantle its nuclear deterrent, or Iran to abandon uranium enrichment entirely, is asking governments to give up what they have identified as core security requirements. Short of regime collapse (a threshold that sanctions have essentially never reached on their own), economic pain rarely tips this calculus; where it has, as in Libya and Iran, the demand had first shrunk to something the government could concede. The instrument asks governments to trade their strategic interests for economic relief, in cases specifically selected for how unconditionally those strategic interests are held.
Cuba: persistence without purpose
The US embargo on Cuba has survived thirteen administrations, more than six decades, and votes in the UN General Assembly that have condemned it every year but one since 1992. The 2025 vote went 165 to 7, with only five other governments joining the United States and Israel. By every coercive measure the embargo has failed, for longer and more thoroughly than any comparable measure in modern foreign policy history: Castro did not comply, his successors have not complied, and Cuban political structures have not democratised. The embargo has lasted anyway, because of domestic US politics, specifically the electoral significance of Cuban-American communities concentrated in Florida, for decades a pivotal swing state.
Domestic constituency pressure has repeatedly overridden foreign policy analysis, including within administrations that privately acknowledged the embargo's futility. The opening the Obama administration announced in December 2014 restored diplomatic relations the following year and loosened travel and remittance rules, but it could not lift an embargo that Congress had written into law. The Trump administration partly rolled back that opening in 2017, and in January 2026 Washington went further, authorising tariffs on any country that supplies Cuba with oil. The instrument serves functions entirely disconnected from its stated foreign policy objective, which is why its demonstrated ineffectiveness produces no political pressure to end it.The Contested Cases — What the Successes Show
The strongest version of the case for sanctions points to three cases: South Africa, Libya, and Iran. None is as clean as its retelling.
South Africa is the most frequently cited success, and it has substance. The US Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, passed over Ronald Reagan’s veto, was part of a broader multilateral sanctions package that coincided with, and arguably accelerated, the end of apartheid. Contemporary observers credited economic pressure with a real role in the transition, chiefly a psychological one, alongside a flight of private bank lending that owed as much to credit risk as to politics; George H. W. Bush, lifting US sanctions in 1991, allowed that they had had some effect while giving far more credit to de Klerk’s reforms. Apartheid ended through a convergence: the sustained organisational capacity and moral authority of the ANC, the end of the Cold War (which removed the anti-communist justification that had given South Africa’s apartheid government strategic cover with Western governments), sustained internal resistance across two decades, and economic pressure from sanctions and capital flight. Audie Klotz is sceptical of simple causal attribution in the South African case and emphasises norm diffusion (the delegitimisation of apartheid as a political system in international opinion) as a force structurally distinct from economic coercion.
South Africa was also not a consolidated authoritarian state in the sense that makes the second link of the chain fail so reliably. It had a functioning economy deeply integrated into Western capital markets, a white business elite that held substantial foreign assets and maintained relationships with international investors increasingly alarmed by the political trajectory, and a political opposition, the ANC, with real organisational depth and external support. The structural conditions that normally prevent economic pain from translating into elite political pressure were, in South Africa, only partially present. This is what made it susceptible to a form of coercion that consistently fails elsewhere. What it shows is narrower than the case for comprehensive sanctions: economic pressure can contribute when the conditions that normally short-circuit the causal chain are absent.
Libya’s 2003 agreement to dismantle its WMD programs and pay compensation for the Lockerbie bombing is the second canonical success. Richard Nephew frames the Libyan case as one where sanctions contributed meaningfully to an outcome, though as part of a broader coercive context. That context included the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, and Gaddafi reportedly told Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi that he would do whatever the Americans wanted because he had seen what happened in Iraq and was afraid. The chronology is less tidy than that remark. Libya had offered to give up its chemical weapons in secret talks in 1999, and its intelligence officials approached Britain about negotiating away the WMD programmes in early March 2003, before the invasion began; the war may have hardened Gaddafi’s resolve to finish the deal, but it did not start the process. That is what makes Libya a poor test of sanctions on their own: by the time Gaddafi signed, years of sanctions, a negotiated path to relief and an American army next door were all pulling the same way.
Iran and the 2015 JCPOA is the most plausible sanctions success case in recent history. The years of intensifying US and multilateral sanctions on Iran produced visible economic effects: Iran’s oil revenues contracted substantially, the rial depreciated sharply, inflation rose, and Iranian negotiators explicitly acknowledged the pressure they were operating under. What those sanctions achieved was an agreement to limit, not end, Iran’s nuclear program, subject to verified compliance and in exchange for sanctions relief. This is a constrained objective, but a real one, and the causal connection between sanctions pressure and Iranian willingness to negotiate is credible. Iran is the case that most closely satisfies the structural conditions for sanctions effectiveness: the objective was limited and concrete; multilateral implementation reduced escape routes; and Iranian elites with foreign exposure were directly affected.
What happened next shows the same mechanism running backwards. The US withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, reimposing sanctions unilaterally and demanding comprehensive compliance with a maximalist set of demands extending well beyond the original nuclear agreement. Iran did not respond with renewed compliance; beginning in 2019, it exceeded JCPOA limits on uranium enrichment in systematic steps. The sanctions had not become less painful; the leverage that years of sustained pressure had built was destroyed by unilateral withdrawal, which eliminated the reversibility condition that gave them coercive logic.
The Political Economy of a Failed Instrument
If sanctions so consistently fail to achieve their stated objectives, why do governments keep imposing them? Because the instrument does at least four jobs at once, and coercion is the one that carries the public case.
The coercive function, changing the target’s behaviour through economic pressure, is the one that gets the speeches. The expressive function is different: recording formally that certain behaviour is unacceptable within the international order, creating a normative record regardless of whether it produces compliance. The alliance-management function is different again: demonstrating solidarity with partners, maintaining coalition cohesion, giving aligned governments a shared action to take that affirms commitment without requiring military engagement. And there is a degradation function: imposing material costs that reduce the target’s capacity over time, even without immediate compliance, by restricting access to technology, capital, and expertise.
None of these functions is fraudulent. The expressive function matters in a world where international norms require maintenance to remain operative. The degradation function may be the most honest account of what Russia sanctions are achieving: long-term technology denial affecting military-industrial capacity, a squeeze on the capital available to the defence sector, and restrictions on the know-how transfer that Russian aerospace and electronics sectors need. Alliance management explains why the 2022 Russia sanctions package served EU cohesion regardless of what it achieved in Moscow — the package demonstrated that European states would absorb economic costs to maintain solidarity with Ukraine, which mattered for the credibility of the Western response.
The trouble lies in conflating these functions. Governments invoke coercive success claims the record does not support to justify harms that only make sense under a coercive logic: severe civilian suffering in Iran and Iraq, long-term economic impoverishment in Venezuela, the compounding deprivations of comprehensive embargo in Cuba. A sanctions regime serving expressive, degradation, or alliance-management purposes could be designed to minimise civilian harm: targeted measures on decision-makers and their assets, technology restrictions on military sectors, coordinated financial measures on elites. The fact that existing sanctions architecture routinely imposes broad civilian costs suggests that “this is coercion” is doing political work that “this is an expression of norms” or “this is degradation of military capacity” cannot. Civilian suffering, under the coercive theory, is the mechanism, the pressure that will eventually force governments to change course; under any of the other three it is collateral damage with no function at all.
Daniel Drezner identifies another layer: sanctions solve a political problem for the governments that impose them as much as they pressure targets. Targeted sanctions in particular, he notes, solve the problem of “doing something” in the face of a target’s transgressions without solving the policy problem of making the target change course, and they do so cheaply, indefinitely and with little criticism. Imposing sanctions demonstrates resolve to domestic audiences and international partners, forecloses certain diplomatic options, and creates political path dependencies that make the instrument difficult to lift even when its failure is evident. This is sanctions as acting without acting: governments can impose costs on themselves and others through expressive and degradation channels while avoiding the more politically costly alternatives: military action, formal diplomatic accommodation, or the explicit acceptance of an adversary’s fait accompli. The political cost of admitting that the primary non-military coercive instrument of international order does not work, and therefore that the realistic alternatives are worse, is high enough that sustained overclaiming remains the rational strategy.
The Narrow Conditions of Effectiveness
The conditions under which sanctions work follow from why they usually fail, and they describe an instrument substantially different from what is typically deployed.
Sanctions succeed more often when pre-sanction trade is strong, when they are imposed swiftly, and when sender and target were on good terms beforehand; that much holds across 37 quantitative studies. Hufbauer’s case data and the wider literature add to this five conditions under which sanctions have actually worked.
The first is a limited, concrete objective. Regime change and nuclear disarmament are where sanctions acting alone have the weakest record: even the cases usually counted as successes, from South Africa to Libya, involved other decisive pressures. Trade practice adjustments, specific regulatory compliance, and the release of detained nationals are achievable under the right circumstances. The mismatch between the maximalism of stated objectives and the instrument’s actual capacity is a persistent feature of sanctions policy, because domestic political audiences demand maximalist objectives, while the instrument can at best achieve modest ones.
The second is strong pre-existing economic integration. The EU-Russia relationship before 2022 offered more leverage than the US-North Korea relationship ever has, because there was vastly more economic value at stake on both sides. Russia was the EU’s largest energy supplier. The threat of disrupting that relationship was credible and costly. The US-Cuba relationship has been structured as an embargo for so long that there is almost no economic integration left to threaten; the leverage the US once had has been consumed by decades of embargo and long since replaced by Cuban adaptation.
The third is multilateral implementation that closes off escape routes. UN Security Council sanctions are structurally more effective than unilateral US or EU measures because they cannot be legally circumvented through China, Russia, or other major powers. US secondary sanctions are the attempt to replicate this through dollar-system leverage, but they are imperfect substitutes: they can be dodged, up to a point, through local-currency settlement, barter and the alternative financial plumbing Russia has been building since 2014, though since 2023 a payment in roubles or yuan no longer puts a bank beyond OFAC’s reach.
The fourth, and the hardest to meet, is target elites who cannot insulate themselves from economic effects. This requires either that elites hold substantial assets within the sanctioning jurisdiction (making asset freezes and travel restrictions costly to them personally) or that the economic constraints cascade through the economy in ways that affect their political base. South Africa partially satisfied this condition. Russia in 2022 did not: Kremlin-connected wealth had spent eight years since Crimea learning to live with sanctions risk, and when the EU finally listed tycoons such as Mikhail Fridman, Alisher Usmanov and Alexei Mordashov in February 2022, the freezes changed nothing in Moscow’s course.
The fifth is a credible path to relief, with the conditions for lifting stated in advance. Permanent sanctions, or sanctions without defined benchmarks for relief, provide no inducement to comply: if the target cannot see a path to relief, the cost-benefit calculus runs entirely against concession.
The pattern that emerges from these conditions is uncomfortable for the foreign policy establishments that most frequently deploy sanctions. The cases where sanctions have been most vigorously imposed (Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela) are almost all cases where these conditions are absent: objectives are maximal, pre-existing integration is limited or has been deliberately reduced, multilateral implementation is incomplete, target elites have proved capable of insulating themselves, and the reversibility condition is either absent or has been violated. In Venezuela it took a US military operation in January 2026, rather than years of sanctions, to remove Nicolás Maduro. Where these conditions are present, political demand for sanctions tends to be lower, because the relationship is cooperative enough that the credible threat of disruption is itself sufficient pressure. Those quiet successes never have to be imposed, so they never enter the tally.
The JCPOA withdrawal and the reversibility paradox
The JCPOA is what the fifth condition looks like in practice, and the US withdrawal in May 2018 is what breaking it costs. The agreement had been designed with explicit conditionality: Iran would limit uranium enrichment, reduce centrifuge numbers, and accept intrusive IAEA verification in exchange for phased sanctions relief. The IAEA's quarterly reports from Implementation Day in January 2016 up to the US withdrawal consistently verified that Iran was implementing its nuclear commitments; a brief slip, when heavy-water stocks edged 0.1 tonnes over the 130-tonne cap in November 2016, was fixed within weeks by shipping heavy water out of the country. The Trump administration reimposed sanctions although Iranian non-compliance had not triggered the snapback, and that sent an unambiguous signal: compliance does not guarantee relief.
From July 2019, Iran exceeded JCPOA limits in deliberate steps, and in April 2021 it began enriching uranium to 60 percent purity — a short technical step from weapons-grade. The sanctions stayed in place without the leverage they once carried, and what followed was a slide from economic to military coercion: Israeli and US strikes on Iran's nuclear sites in June 2025, the European-triggered return of UN sanctions in September 2025, and open war in 2026. A June 2026 memorandum briefly brought US relief on Iranian oil sales, and Washington revoked it within three weeks. US withdrawal showed that the reversibility condition is the mechanism through which the coercive logic of sanctions works: without it, economic pressure offers the target nothing to comply for.Standing in Munich in February 2022, Kamala Harris was making a specific kind of promise: that the costs waiting for Russia were severe enough to deter an invasion and, failing that, would inflict great damage on those responsible. What the damage was supposed to do next she left to the theory of the instrument, the one that has structured Western sanctions policy through the Iran nuclear negotiations, the North Korea standoff, the Cuban embargo, the measures on Venezuela and dozens of smaller-scale episodes.
Decision-makers are not naive about that theory’s record. They keep reaching for the instrument because the question its failures raise, if not sanctions, then what, has only uncomfortable answers, and because the honest description of what sanctions do, record an objection, hold a coalition together, wear an adversary down, cannot carry a speech the way a promise of consequences can.
The costs came, as promised. What was significant and unprecedented about the 2022 package was the size of the coalition willing to absorb economic damage of its own to put on record that an invasion would not pass unanswered. In the theory behind the speeches, that was the means. It turned out to be the result.
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