Declaring Russia state sponsor of terrorism would be an accurate description of the state of affairs. But it is a threat you can only make good on once. And that is one of our big remaining non-military threats against Russia.
We have the state-sponsor designation. And then we have the secondary-sanctions threat. But after that, we start getting into military steps to dissuade any further bad behavior.
This is maybe bad enough that you want to make good on that threat. After all, at some point you have to make good on that threat, else it is no longer a threat at all. But we need to give real serious consideration as to what that leaves us left on the table.
And the other thing is that we shouldn't go first on that. We've done a real good job on this entire thing of coordinating with our allies. We need to make sure that they're not blindsided by any declaration that we make. And ideally we would convince the Germans or French to make that designation first.
This has the strong whiff of the V2 attacks. We dismiss those attacks as not having an impact on the outcome of the war. But in the meantime, they did manage to kill 9,000 Britons.
It doesn't necessarily mean that no one can do business with them, but secondary sanctions do usually follow. It means that no American can do business with them. But there are few Americans who are doing so right now, anyway.
The biggest thing is that it is a waiver of sovereign immunity. And that means that the victims of Russian terrorism can sue Russia in federal court. And since Russia has hundreds of billions of dollars in assets in the United States that are currently frozen, there is a huge pot of money that victims could collect on.
That would be a huge problem for the Russian economy and the Russian government's finances. And the Russian government knows that and has been trying to avoid that designation. It really is a huge piece of leverage that we shouldn't pull the trigger on lightly.