>The economists who claim that tariffs will harm normal Americans were also the economists who claimed that sanctions would destroy the Russian economy. They had the opposite effect, for reasons that still remain somewhat unclear.

They didn’t have the opposite effect. They were ineffective in general, because Russia has large trade partners not aligned with the West and it has been preparing for it, optimizing the government apparatus for 20 years (financial bloc for 30 years). There are plenty of A-players (head of central bank, minister of finance etc), working industrial policy and digitalized processes, and they can make decisions very fast both politically and bureaucratically.