That's how you end up fighting wars nobody wanted. If you threaten Armageddon over every little thing and then don't deliver, nobody is going to take you seriously when you're, well, serious.

I'm convinced that's how the US ended up bombing Serbia - the Clinton administration tried to buy a little cheap grace by threatening the Serbs, thinking Milosevic would knuckle under and that would be that. But they were ignored. More threats followed and were also ignored. At some point Clinton had to do something or nobody on the planet was ever going to believe he had the backbone to carry out a threat.