Washington faces difficult questions about “red lines” not only from Russia. In Foreign Affairs, there is China that wants to increase its influence in Asia and Iran that is quietly approaching nuclear weapons
In each of these cases, one potential weakness is evident in communicating clear-cut limitations to US adversaries: The adversary could simply ignore them and force the US to comply with its threats or they will appear weak and unimportant.
As the authors point out, potential frustrations are not the only or even the most important problem. “Red lines” are often doomed to fail for strategic and psychological reasons: Public threats may provoke their targets to resist or retaliate rather than force them to retreat. However, abandoning “red lines” is not a solution either, as Washington cannot simply sit back and wait for hostile countries to become active to the detriment of US interests.
The main problem for the U.S. in effectively using red lines, however, is that Washington puts less at stake than its adversaries, according to the authors of the piece. Moscow is interested in Ukraine and China values Taiwan more than the United States, and this asymmetry of interests partly explains why world leaders often cannot get the other side to believe in their “red lines.”