The correct situation for issuing a threat is where someone will do something that you don’t like, but where they have a significant probability of changing their behavior if you threaten them, and the average benefit of that behavior change for you and/or them justifies the average costs of their possible counter-reaction, the possibility that someone might retaliate against you for threatening them, and the possibility that you could be marked as an enemy for threatening your target.
Reliably to achieve this behavior change, especially in a high information situation, the target must be roughly rational, and must believe that you have a credible threat, based on your own benefit calculation, which they must therefore somewhat understand or at least have a surrogate story for why you would be willing to carry out your threat at significant cost to yourself. Furthermore, the target’s own benefit calculation must also show that submitting to your threat is preferable to risking your penalties.
The key difficulty is that if you and your target are roughly rational actors, both of you would seek independent verification of the various claims and circumstances underlying both actors’ situation. Naturally you would want to ensure your threat will work, so you want to set things in order to avoid your target making an error. Historically speaking, from the target’s perspective, the words of your threat are nowhere near 100% accurate. In order to make a case for complying with a threat, then the target must also get some ground truth in order to make an accurate judgment. If the target can’t make an accurate judgment, then there is a high probability that they will not do what you want, which would defeat the entire point of threatening them.
However, if the creation of these realities is roughly independent of the threat, then they can be monitored and assessed without any threat being made at all.
Consider the following real-life example: you are working towards a just government in your own country. You might consider denying that you are a threat to the various Johnny Dictators and other wicked actors around the world. Historically, good-government people oppose the evil-government ones, and often by force. It will take a long period of nonaggression before any roughly rational evil ruler would give weight to the possibility that a do-gooder with enough power would let them slide. Worse, by that point, the time of rule for a good person will come to an end by old age, and so the next generation of do-gooders will come to power without a track record, restarting the cycle. Hence, your very existence and works as a decent human being will cause them to react.