Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Stop Offensive Cyberoperations Against Russia

Robin Brooks, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute, took to X recently to declare that "there needs to be a ban on any academic papers that interpret Russia’s resilient GDP as a sign that sanctions aren’t working." I found it remarkable that he should acknowledge the unexpected resilience of Russia’s economy yet try to disbar analysis which might suggest, therefore, that sanctions had failed.

Brooks produces some interesting analysis, and at the heart of his statement lies an important argument that others have taken up recently: that Western powers didn’t impose tough enough sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine crisis, but could still impose such a catastrophic economic cost on Russia that Putin will, for the first time, be forced to back down.

Let’s take a look at what a maximum pressure policy in 2014 might have involved. (...)