Russia recently launched its second-largest missile barrage on Kyiv since the start of the war. More than 600 missiles and drones, civilian infrastructure hit, air defenses saturated. It wasn’t random. It came within weeks of President Donald Trump‘s latest meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, and just as his administration continues to stall on the one enforcement tool it keeps dangling: secondary sanctions.
The sequence tells you everything. Russia escalates. Trump delays. And the international order watches quietly, recalibrating.
Throughout this term, Trump has used tariffs as the centerpiece of his economic pressure strategy. Not sanctions, not enforcement, not even diplomacy. Just tariffs. He threatened 100 percent tariffs on Russian oil. He imposed additional 25 percent tariffs on India for continuing to buy it. The message was clear: economic statecraft, under Trump, would be tariff-first, tariff-heavy, and tariff-alone.
Until it wasn’t.
Because on August 29, a federal appellate court shut the door on that doctrine. In a 7-4 ruling, the court struck down Trump’s sweeping use of tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The decision doesn’t just create legal uncertainty; it strips Trump of the very tool he has used to posture strength without delivering enforcement. The tariffs may stand temporarily under a stay, but the writing is on the wall. They are going away. The legal pretext is gone.
Which means one thing: Secondary sanctions are now the only viable lever left.
And time is running out.
Trump first introduced the idea of secondary sanctions this summer, warning that if Russia didn’t agree to a ceasefire, the U.S. would penalize any country helping fund the Kremlin’s war effort. That included India, Turkey, China, and even the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The plan sounded aggressive. But then came the delay. A 50-day grace period. Then another shortened deadline. Then a reset summit with Putin. No enforcement.
Even the tariff against India, imposed in late August, was limited in scope and uneven in rationale. It was framed not as a sanctions measure, but as a trade dispute. And while India’s oil flows from Russia continued, China’s did too, with no penalty at all. For all the talk of secondary enforcement, the application has been selective, incoherent, and easily dismissed.
The problem now isn’t just inconsistency. It’s structural. Trump no longer has the legal authority to wage tariff warfare under IEEPA. That option has been taken off the board. And Congress is unlikely to grant him new tariff powers after the courts just ruled that doing so unilaterally violated the separation of powers.
Which leaves him with only one path forward: real secondary sanctions.
Not threats. Not tweets. Not conditional rhetoric. Actual enforcement.
That means designating the Chinese logistics firms moving dual-use goods into Russia. It means cutting off Kyrgyz sanctions evasion corridors that have exploded since 2022. And most importantly, it means showing that the U.S. will not tolerate the global circumvention networks that are keeping Putin’s war economy alive.
This isn’t theoretical. The window is now.
If Trump imposes credible secondary sanctions in an expeditious manner, it will reinforce the deterrent value of American economic pressure. It will show that despite the court ruling, the U.S. still has leverage, and is willing to use it. It will send a message to Moscow, Beijing, and every shadow bank in between: This is no longer bluffing.
If he doesn’t, then the posture collapses.
Because without tariffs, and without secondary enforcement, Trump’s strategy becomes a hollow shell. The last six months of warnings, delays, and promises of consequences will be revealed for what they were—calibrated ambiguity designed to delay hard decisions. And Russia, already emboldened, will see the gap between rhetoric and capability as permanent.
So will everyone else.
China is watching to see whether the U.S. can credibly enforce sanctions on Russia before it even thinks about how to respond to a Taiwan crisis. India is watching to see if its minor tariff penalty was symbolic or structural. Turkey, UAE, and Central Asia are watching to see how long they can monetize the West’s enforcement gaps.
And Ukraine? Ukraine is counting missiles while Washington counts down expired deadlines.
This isn’t about being hawkish. It’s about being real. Trump has lost his tariff shield. He can’t fall back on trade threats anymore. And for all his resistance to traditional sanctions policy, that is all that remains on the table. The State Department is ready. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is ready. Congress is holding a sanctions package with bipartisan support.
But the clock is ticking. Because once the IEEPA stay expires in October, and once another Russian missile barrage hits Kyiv without consequence, no one will be asking whether Trump can still impose secondary sanctions.
They will be asking whether he ever intended to.
Brett Erickson is the managing principal of Obsidian Risk Advisors, and serves on the board of Seton Hall School of Diplomacy and International Relations, DePaul Driehaus College of Business, and Loyola University School of Law—Center for Compliance Studies.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
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