Fig. 4: The effectiveness of retaliation.

a and b Illustration of high bilateral interdependence (a) and high unilateral interdependence (b) between the sender and the target. A node represents a country. The weight (width) of an edge represents the source node’s LPT ratio with the destination node. The sender, target, bloc, and other countries are in red, blue, orange, and grey, respectively. The sender and the target countries are highlighted by the grey shade. Edges sourcing from the sender and the target are in red and blue, respectively. c–j, The sender and target’s GDP change during and after sanctions imposed by China on the US (c and e), by Germany on France (d and f), by China on Indonesia (g and i), and by the US on Singapore (h and j), respectively. The target has three options when the sender imposes sanctions: not retaliate (base), adopt individual short-term retaliation (individual), and collective short-term retaliation (collective) strategies. The grey dashed line indicates when the sanctions end. The number close to the grey dashed line is the reduction in GDP for the sender/target in equilibrium after decoupling. The inset in c, d, g, and h shows the effectiveness of sanctions under the no retaliation (red), individual retaliation (blue), and collective retaliation (orange) retaliation, respectively. The numbers above the blue and orange bars indicate the effectiveness of the individual and collective retaliation strategies.