In the Ukraine crisis, the weapons of choice for the Obama administration and NATO have been lots of stern talks followed up by exceedingly anemic sanctions.

But weak sanctions yield weak results and they tend to cut both ways even if they don’t draw equal volumes of blood. If a nation is no longer permitted to import this or that, then someone, somewhere is losing out on some export business. Sanctions can be truly effective when imposed on a pariah nation as upon the country that was once Rhodesia. Even so, landlocked and without a friend in the world, it held out for many, many months before capitulating and becoming Zimbabwe.