Everyone Wants to Seize Russia’s Money. It’s a Terrible Idea.

Thus far, the idea of supplying Ukraine through a spending bill has brought scorn from congressional Republicans who wonder whether Americans’ taxes wouldn’t be better spent on defending the U.S.-Mexico border. The REPO Act, by contrast, could make “Russia foot the bill for its own aggression,” as a group of Brookings Institution scholars puts it. Mr. Johnson himself calls it “pure poetry.” It is a tempting idea.

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But it is a bad one. ...

If Russia, China and other diplomatic rivals were to decide that their dollar assets were vulnerable and that they could no longer trust the dollar as a means of exchange, we would feel the pain of that $34 trillion in debt in a way that we don’t now. Retaining the advantages of a reserve currency depends on our behaving as a trustworthy and neutral custodian of others’ assets. If we start stealing people’s money, that could change.

Ed Morrissey

I see this as a bad idea in a different way. Seizing Russian assets would be an act of war, just as Russia's seizure of Ukraine's sovereign territory is. Putin would certainly see it as an act of war, and would start applying his escalate-to-deescalate strategy accordingly. 

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