The West Can't Survive the Sanctions It Needs to Deter China

The Diplomat

5 days ago

The West still believes that sanctions signal resolve. China has already moved on to testing what happens when they don't.
In the modern context, sanctions are supposed to act as a line of defense, measures designed to dissuade adversaries before a conflict even begins. But for sanctions to carry weight, they must be seen as viable: not just in concept, but in execution.
At present, that foundation is unstable. While Western leaders continue to invoke unity and strength, the tools meant to apply real economic pressure are disjointed and prone to breakdown under strain. The mechanisms required to turn intent into credible action, coordinated enforcement, reliable escalation pathways, and the stamina to withstand domestic fallout, are either missing altogether or proving insufficient where they exist.
The recent response to Russia illustrates this point. Sanctions were rolled out quickly, but their impact has been diluted by inconsistent implementation, a patchwork of legal frameworks, and the absence of long-term political consensus. Instead of a sustained front, we've seen a series of measures that lack follow-through and coherence. Recent reporting by the New York Times highlighted a lack of new U.S. sanctions on Russia under the second Donald Trump administration.
What was meant to project strength has instead revealed systemic vulnerability: goods still move through loopholes, enforcement lags, and even allied governments backpedal when domestic costs begin to rise.
China, in watching all this unfold, is learning exactly where the West's thresholds lie, and what the United States and its partners are willing to tolerate in practice. The New York Times found that more than 130 companies in mainland China and Hong Kong 'are advertising immediate sales of restricted computer chips to Russia.' None of the companies found making such advertisements is under sanctions, illustrating the weakness of the existing sanctions regime.
The implication is clear: unless sanctions can be made to function as a credible deterrent – fast, coordinated, and capable of weathering both blowback and changing political tides – they will remain tools of symbolic outrage rather than instruments of strategic prevention.
What China Has Learned From the West
China has not watched the West's response to Russia passively. It has studied it closely. What Beijing has absorbed isn't limited to what the sanctions covered, but how slowly they were implemented, how unevenly they were enforced, and how easily they were sidestepped. The obvious conclusion is that the Western alliance lacks the collective readiness, institutional durability, and enforcement cohesion to sustain economic warfare at scale.
China has treated this gap as a design problem and moved to solve it. It is not just Central Asia where Beijing has laid groundwork for sanctions resistance. It's Mozambique, Angola, Kenya and others. Across the African coastlines, Chinese-financed ports, nominally commercial, have become dual-use infrastructure, optimized for logistics that operate outside the reach of Western compliance regimes. These are policy hedges: fully legal, fully operational, and ready for repurposing should the need arise.
What matters more than geography is intent. China isn't just building trade routes; it's pressure-testing them. The logistics flowing through Africa, Central Asia, and the Gulf aren't improvised; they're structured to adapt. If one corridor closes, another flexes open. Rather than a workaround, this is a system designed to endure disruption.
What's emerged is not a shadow network, but a parallel system free of geographical bounds. If a corridor in Central Asia gets too hot, another opens along the Indian Ocean. If financial rails in Europe tighten, renminbi clearing centers in the Gulf or sub-Saharan banks pick up the volume.
This quiet scaffolding has a second layer: narrative resilience. China has watched Russia's aura of invincibility unravel, not because Ukraine overwhelmed its forces in the field, but because the myth of dominance eroded on contact. A few drones, a few sabotage campaigns, and the image cracked. Beijing knows its deterrence posture over Taiwan is built on the same kind of illusion. But reputation doesn't survive first contact unless the system behind it can hold.
And so, the real test China is preparing for isn't how to absorb a missile strike. It's how to withstand an economic onslaught – with concrete, physical infrastructure already in place. From transshipment ports to re-export chains to commodity barter networks, China is shaping a world where sanctions arrive too slowly and bite too late.
If deterrence depends on the credibility of economic retaliation, China sees little reason to believe it's something the West can deliver in time, or sustain once it does. What looked like global coordination in 2022 has aged into a cautionary tale. Beijing took notes. And those notes are being written into logistics policy, procurement strategy, and foreign investment portfolios.
The West still believes that sanctions signal resolve. China has already moved on to testing what happens when they don't.
Where the West Breaks Down
For sanctions to deter, they must be more than declarative. They must be implementable. That requires cohesion, enforcement, and the political will to endure costs. The West is faltering across each axis.
The initial sanctions against Russia created the appearance of unity, but that perception did not survive operational scrutiny. The United States moved fast, targeting financial systems and state assets. But Europe, despite its rhetoric, remained hostage to its own dependencies. Natural gas, refined oil, and dual-use trade routes continued operating, sometimes with superficial tweaks. Firms headquartered in the United Kingdom underwrote and shipped liquefied natural gas shipments even as London loudly condemned Moscow.
Diplomatically, the West congratulated itself on unity. But logistics told a different story. Russian crude still moved. Technology still arrived. Foreign currency flowed through shadow structures and mirrored financial networks. The sanctions didn't stop the machine; they forced it underground. And in doing so, they revealed the real weakness: Western policy coherence breaks when economic sacrifice enters the room.
Even more troubling is the West's enforcement infrastructure. It is fragmented, jurisdictionally diluted, and woefully reliant on private sector compliance. Export control regimes function on checklists, not intent. Sanctions regimes target entities, not ecosystems. Goods flow because no one is watching closely enough to connect the dots between a component sold in Denmark and a missile silo in Yasny.
This is an issue of bureaucratic fragmentation. Export control in the European Union is not centralized. The EU sets the rules, but each member state enforces them on its own. That's led to a patchwork of national systems, with uneven thresholds, timelines, and oversight. In the U.S., responsibility is split across the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments, with no unified standard and different tolerances depending on the agency. The U.K. has an aggressive rhetorical posture but little appetite for financial disruption. The enforcement system is built on declarations, not interdiction.
Some governments have taken limited steps to plug these holes. Secondary sanctions have been discussed. Legal thresholds for maritime insurance have been debated. But these measures always seem to arrive too late, and in diluted form. The overarching pattern is not one of negligence, but of strategic risk-aversion. Everyone wants sanctions to work. No one wants to be responsible for the costs.
The problem is compounded by Western political culture. Sanctions are deployed in democracies that are increasingly intolerant of sustained sacrifice. Gasoline prices spike, and the political debate shifts from foreign accountability to domestic affordability. Voters expect moral clarity with economic impunity. That contradiction is not sustainable. Nor is it lost on adversaries.
Recent signals from U.S. President Donald Trump indicate that sanctions could be lifted as part of a future ceasefire negotiation with Russia. That notion is dangerous; it confirms that the West cannot even guarantee its own commitment to punishment. Once sanctions are perceived as temporary or negotiable, their deterrent effect collapses.
If that happens, we should expect the circumvention pathways currently running from China through Central Asia into Russia to reverse. Russia will become the supplier. The infrastructure is already in place. The reversal won't require new policy, just political inertia.
If China sees sanctions as survivable, if it sees the West fracture before enforcement even begins, then any deterrent function is lost. The cost calculus changes. An assault on Taiwan becomes not a question of risk, but of cost absorption. And in Beijing's internal risk modeling, that shift is everything.
Sanctions against Russia weren't just fragmented; they were sequenced in ways that allowed for adaptation. Moscow learned where the seams were, and reinforced them. China won't get that learning curve. If deterrence is to work, sanctions must be immediate, comprehensive, and pre-aligned before the first move.
What Must Be Built to Survive Sanctions Deployment
Sanctions cannot deter unless they are backed by structures capable of instant deployment and durable enforcement. But structure alone is not enough. What the West needs is a different mindset, one that sees sanctions not as symbolic gestures or policy options, but as a warfighting domain.
Institutional coordination must be pre-negotiated. Allies need unified response frameworks that remove the lag between outrage and action. Sanctions should not require months of debate. They should trigger automatically upon threshold breaches. Building that kind of system will take political will and legal creativity, but without it, deterrence is just for show.
Enforcement must be elevated to a strategic priority. That means not only harmonizing export controls, but embedding real-time detection into trade and financial networks. The technology exists. What's lacking is mandate. Intelligence agencies must work alongside trade ministries. Customs inspections must integrate with sanction monitoring tools. Interdiction must become normal, not exceptional.
Perhaps most crucially, political leadership must prepare their populations for the reality of economic disruption. Deterrence does not come cheap. It must be paid for with volatility, discomfort, and sacrifice. Western electorates have grown accustomed to painless power projection. That era is over. If sanctions are to hold, public communication must change. Politicians will have to explain not just the why of sanctions, but the cost. Not everyone will accept it. But if leaders are unwilling to speak to it, deterrence has no chance.
None of this is optional. China is modeling the West's failures, preparing for sanctions the way it would prepare for conflict. The West, by contrast, treats sanctions as a foreign policy sidebar. That asymmetry will prove decisive.
When Deterrence Lives or Dies Before a Shot Is Fired
China won't lead with tanks or missiles. It will begin with a question: how far will the West really go? Not in theory, not on paper, but in action, and cost.
What Beijing is measuring isn't just the scale of potential sanctions. It's whether the political systems behind them are capable of withstanding their own decisions. Thus far, the West's track record offers little reassurance. The Western response to Russia has exposed enforcement gaps, reversals in resolve, and growing pressure to trade strategic aims for economic calm. For China, that's not just data, it's opportunity.
Many of the vulnerabilities are already visible. Insurance markets underwrite adversary trade. Export systems still allow sensitive components to reach military sites. Legal frameworks are designed for demonstration, not durability. The symptoms differ, but they point to the same underlying condition: a deterrence doctrine that lacks structural reinforcement.
Beijing is unlikely to risk a military conflict over Taiwan without first testing whether those same weak spots can be exploited again. And China knows that if the West can't absorb the initial shock of sanctions, if its economic lines fracture under pressure, then the entire strategy of containment becomes hollow.
This isn't speculation. It's contingency planning. China is preparing for the economic blowback long before the shooting starts. If it sees the West blink in that first test, if sanctions unravel, dilute, or get bargained away, then escalation becomes far more manageable.
The task now is infrastructural. Deterrence must be built, not simply declared. And it must be built to hold under stress, legal, financial, and political. That means moving beyond statements of intent toward enforceable alignment, pre-coordinated architecture, and a public that understands the stakes.
Because once deterrence breaks, there is no easy reset. By the time the West finds itself responding to an invasion, it will be too late to design the economic shield it should have had in place all along.
And the cost of that oversight will arrive swiftly, and with consequences far beyond Taiwan.