The U.S. response should be asymmetric. President Biden issued a veiled threat to Putin when they met last June in Geneva, by mentioning the ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline: “I looked at him. I said, ‘Well, how would you feel if ransomware took on the pipelines from your oil fields?’” That was fair warning.

Bring maximum diplomatic pressure to bear on Germany and other European states to end oil and gas imports from Russia. According to one estimate, those sales provide the Kremlin with $1 billion a day. Berlin remains the weakest link in the effort to create an effective sanctions regime against Russia. This position, craven now, will become morally untenable for Germany if Russia starts gassing Ukrainians. It should lead to the immediate removal of all Russian financial institutions from the SWIFT transaction system to make payments for oil and gas almost impossible.

Tear apart Russia’s supply chains. This is the project of Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, who has been looking at ways to disrupt the Kremlin’s military supply chains. It should move beyond this to every sector of the Russian economy, by automatically forbidding any company doing business in Russia to also do business in the United States and, hopefully, Europe.