Here’s why the Ukrainians might welcome a deal that hands over a stake in the country’s mineral wealth to Uncle Don, er, Sam.
Donald Trump has long argued that the United States should act more like an empire — or at least an acquisitive real estate tycoon — by using the leverage of its military and commercial influence to extract economically valuable concessions from countries that want access to our markets or aid in their defense. We are, in his view, Uncle Sucker, always paying to bail out our deadbeat friends and relations who never do anything in return. While there is some truth to this and something to be said for ensuring that our foreign aid, trade policy, and military alliances aren’t one-way streets, it’s also a simplistic view of the world (in missing how much we benefit from things like general peace in Europe and South America or the free navigation of the seas), one that’s at odds with much of our foreign policy historically, one that is apt to alienate allies we need at times and in places we can’t always predict (such as the more than 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers who served with our troops in Iraq between 2003 and 2008, a deployment unpopular in Ukraine at the time), and at a certain point is just an immoral use of our power.
Trump’s latest idea is to demand mineral-resource concessions from Ukraine. Some MAGA voices have celebrated this as a way of getting paid back by Volodymyr Zelensky for all of the aid we’ve given his embattled country. It is at least less appallingly self-interested than it would have been had the president demanded that Zelensky put one of his sons on the board of a Ukrainian gas company (to pick an example). But Ukraine’s government may see a deal as good for them in ways that the anti-Ukraine-aid contingent won’t appreciate. The Financial Times reports:
Kyiv has agreed terms with Washington on a minerals deal that Ukrainian officials hope will improve relations with the Trump administration and pave the way for a long-term US security commitment. Ukrainian officials say Kyiv is now ready to sign the agreement. . . .
“The minerals agreement is only part of the picture. We have heard multiple times from the US administration that it’s part of a bigger picture,” Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister and justice minister who has led the negotiations, told the Financial Times on Tuesday. . . .
The final version of the agreement, dated February 24 and seen by the FT, would establish a fund into which Ukraine would contribute 50 per cent of proceeds from the “future monetisation” of state-owned mineral resources, including oil and gas, and associated logistics. The fund would invest in projects in Ukraine.
While this appears to be a deal both sides are ready to ink, it “leaves crucial questions such as the size of the US stake in the fund and the terms of ‘joint ownership’ deals to be hashed out in follow-up agreements.”
Why would the Ukrainians welcome a deal that hands over a stake in the country’s mineral wealth to Uncle Don, er, Sam? Because they understand that if the United States government has a materially significant stake in Ukraine, the security of Ukraine and the avoidance of any Russian threat to peaceful commerce in Ukraine becomes our business. As the old saying — one that Trump knows as well as anybody — goes, when you owe the bank $10,000, the bank owns you; when you owe the bank $10 million, you own the bank. If this deal goes through as reported, it may not matter that it doesn’t commit our promises to the security of Ukraine; it would commit our interests. And that is a thing for which Zelensky and his nation are willing to pay dearly.