The Saudis have been waging an offensive war for years in Yemen. Yet there hasn't been a single peep about cutting them off SWIFT, sanctioning their royal oligarchs, freezing their western assets, etc, etc.
It seems to send a message that yes, repressive petrostate dictatorships can get away with waging offensive wars... Well, at least some of them can.
A head-and-shoulders decapitation of a regime change in Russia, Chinese irredentism over outer Manchuria, a Han-supremacist lebensraum movement targeting Asia east of the Urals…
> On February 15 [2003, before the invasion started], millions of people protested, in approximately 800 cities around the world. Listed by the 2004 Guinness Book of Records as the largest protest in human history, protests occurred among others in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Republic of Ireland, the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Syria, India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and even McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
I don't think "the largest protest in human history" qualifies as "mostly shrugs and silence" ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
Lack of actual policy making to me is more that the US empire was at the peak of its power. Being punished by America at the time would be worse than trying to maintain a rules based.