I made a bet when this war started: dinner, that oil would break $100 a barrel within weeks. I lost. Six months in, the oil shock never arrived — the market absorbed the war and moved on, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

That is not the only coercive tool landing softer than advertised. Beijing's answer to years of Western tariffs and export controls — flooding global markets with cheap goods rather than retooling its economy — is working, for now, according to the Atlantic Council. China's economy faces real constraints, the Council argues, but Beijing's repressive political system may manage them for far longer than outside analysts expect.

Put the two cases side by side and a pattern emerges: the West's core instruments of economic coercion — tariffs, sanctions, war-by-proxy pressure — are being absorbed rather than broken by the governments they target.

Hypothesis: the common thread is regime type, not policy design — governments that don't answer to markets or voters can out-endure both economic and military pressure aimed at them. Supporting this: the Atlantic Council explicitly credits China's repressive political system with extending the life of an export-maximizing strategy it says would otherwise be unsustainable. Against this: the CFR's oil-market analysis is framed around trading and supply dynamics, not regime resilience — six months without an oil shock may simply reflect how global markets work, independent of who is fighting whom.

The counter-case deserves its due. Six months is not a verdict. The Atlantic Council hedges its own headline with 'for now,' and the Council on Foreign Relations' account of a region 'transformed' by the Iran war suggests the consequences are still working through the system — just not through the price of crude. Coercion can succeed slowly: trade fights and sanctions regimes are usually measured in years, and both pieces describe strain inside the targeted systems, not comfort.

But that is the point of coercive statecraft: it is supposed to outpace the patience of an authoritarian government, not the other way round. If Beijing can out-endure a trade war and the oil market can shrug off a shooting war with Iran, the leverage runs backward — the pressure has to outlast the target, and repression turns out to be a durable source of stamina.

The open question is what Washington does once its favourite levers turn out to be built for economies that can be voted out of office, not ones that answer to no one. Watch whether the Atlantic Council's 'for now' survives the next stretch of the trade fight, and whether a second six months in Iran finally moves the oil price the first six didn't.