The West's economic threats failed to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. Can policymakers fix past mistakes to build painful enough economic threats to deter Chairman Xi from invading Taiwan?

First, we must determine where we went wrong with Russia. The simple answer: the costs promised by the West weren’t impressive enough. In late 2021, President Biden and European leaders called Putin and warned him of “severe economic pain” they would inflict on Russia if Ukraine was invaded.

But just weeks before the invasion, Putin saw the White House and some in Congress had blocked sanctions, not just against the high-profile Nord Stream 2 pipeline, but also on a powerful package of mandatory banking and energy sanctions that would have been triggered by a Russian invasion. No wonder Putin wasn’t afraid.

If we want to stop the CCP from invading Taiwan, we need to address three key challenges to strengthening our economic deterrence.

Challenge One: How can we telegraph the threat of extreme economic costs of war to Beijing in a credible manner that would force Chinese leadership to reconsider an invasion? China’s leaders have to believe the pain we would inflict is too overwhelming to make an invasion worthwhile. While military considerations will outweigh economic ones, we need to identify key pressure points that would damage China’s economy in a way they cannot easily mitigate.

That means looking at how we could cut off China’s top exports (currently all sorts of consumer electronics, machinery, tools, cars, and plastics) to the West and others as well as to sever the supply of the key inputs China needs to power their economy, from oil and gas to semiconductors and computer chips.

Congress then needs to work with the Executive Branch—as conservatives tried to do in 2022 with Russia sanctions—to pass mandatory penalties that would snap into place the moment China launches an invasion of Taiwan, resulting in pain China could see and understand.

This will not be remotely easy. America’s strength lies in our open system of governance. As Americans saw with the difficult fight to force the divestment of TikTok from Chinese ownership, the CCP has learned how to manipulate this system through massive lobbying campaigns.

Challenge Two: How can we get corporations to exert greater pressure on Beijing to refrain from launching a war than on Washington to stop economic penalties on China?

The Chinese system operates more opaquely than ours, but business interests can still make their voices heard in the Politburo. But business leaders rightly fear that lobbying on “sensitive issues” like Taiwan or human rights would get their business kicked out of the country.

If that’s how Beijing wants to play, we should respond. As a start, some members of Congress have stopped taking meetings from lobbyists representing certain Chinese interests. The institution as a whole should go further and strengthen the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) rules to ban all former congressional members and staff from representing Chinese companies and interests.

Challenge Three: As long as American companies continue to operate in China, how can we prevent the CCP from leveraging them for their own purposes?

When the West imposed sanctions on Russia in the early days of the war, the Russian government responded by seizing the assets of exiting companies, such as McDonalds’ buildings, and appropriated them over to new Russian owners. If American companies want to operate in China, we should make sure they don’t provide a bonanza for the CCP to seize. That will help our national interest as well as U.S. companies.

For China, the greatest asset are intellectual property and political leverage. The CCP doesn’t allow American companies to operate in China out of goodwill–only for their own strategic need. Congress should strengthen regulations limiting what data and information U.S. companies can hold in their China branches. The CCP is already trying to pilfer everything they can. We need to ensure there’s a firewall that prevents further U.S. consumer data and proprietary information from crossing the border.

With an adversary as adept as the CCP, the precise threats that make up our economic deterrence will constantly need to evolve. China will inevitably adapt to defend against each arrow in our quiver. That should not be feared, for in the words of President Eisenhower, “plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

Gabriel Noronha is the President of Polaris National Security Foundation. He previously served as the Special Advisor for Iran at the Department of State and as the Special Assistant for the Senate Armed Services Committee.