We may never know what Euroclear, which holds 191bn of 260bn in frozen Russian assets, thinks is wrong with using those assets to backstop Ukranian debts.
Can you imagine the damage to Euroclear’s reputation? Think of what would happen if, every time some government declared war on another, the global community froze those assets and gave them to the victim. My god, what an alarming precedent. Think what would happen to the market if those frozen assets started to move again. What would the Kremlin have to say if those assets, frozen in response to aggression, were given to the victim of that aggression? Cats and dogs living together, total anarchy.
For it to be a precedent, it would have to be applied consistently. But it isn’t; you don’t see Isreal having its assets frozen, or Britain, or France, or the USA. Which means he only precedent you see is the West stealing financial assets from its enemies, regardless of who the aggressor is.
Hey, when the funds are stored in Russian banks, you are certainly welcome to freeze them all you want. But for some reason they typically aren’t. Huh, I wonder why?
I absolutely refuse to use the /s tag. I tend to try to lay it on pretty thick, because specifying that you’re being sarcastic tends to ruin the comedic emphasis the sarcasm is intended to provide.
The problem with giving away the assets, and I’m just parroting Simon Whistler here, is that they have never been used this way while in war time. This would be essentially funding one side’s war machine and could come back to bite western countries if they opt to overthrow a bad actor in the future.
For example, what if Bashar Al-Assad decides on the heavy use of chlorine gas on the majority Sunni in his country. The West opts to overthrow. The West are then the aggressors. Does Euroclear then freeze US assets and give them to Assad according to the precedent set by Russia v Ukraine?
The judiciary likes to follow precedent and consistency, it fairs less well when there is nuance and subject to interpretation. From a geopolitical standpoint, do we really want the judiciary determining who the good guys and the bad guys are?
You are walking on the street in the public square of your town. You encounter a child and someone who you perceive as a parent having a struggle. The struggle escalates and you see the parent start bludgeoning the child with their fists. Other than the absolute trauma of the experience, you fear the child is going to receive some long term injuries from this. How do you act?
I misread your comment. I wouldn’t have agreed that US would be the aggressors in that case. In such a hypothetical case, they would be defending the sunnis from Assad’s aggression. Assuming they got there in time to do anything about it and were actually interested in defending the region’s peoples and prosperity instead of securing oil.
It’s not aggressive to stop a bully from striking a child- the opposite actually- though you might have to use aggression.
Unfortunately at the geopolitical level, things are not always so morally easy, as I suspect you already understand.
Even in my brutish example, it depends on the lens in which we see things. In an orthodox culture, it may be the parent’s duty to harshly discipline a child. Perhaps meddling would be seen as a faux pas. Or perhaps leaving matters to authorities would be considered cowardly. Even still, maybe it just depends on the day and who’s tribe witnessed the event. The human experience is paradoxically wonderful, isn’t it?
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