The whole point of this exercise was to convince Trump and those in his orbit that contributing to Europe’s defense against Russian aggression was worth it.

T he Trump administration needed something to show for the pressure campaign it has put on Ukraine — pressure from which Moscow has been spared. The “minerals deal” the administration muscled its partner into accepting will have to suffice. Indeed, to hear administration officials talk about the agreement, it might as well be the peace deal itself.

“This agreement signals clearly to Russia that the Trump Administration is committed to a peace process centered on a free, sovereign, and prosperous Ukraine over the long term,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

“This deal is good for the American taxpayer that is recouping the billions of dollars that we’ve put into supporting Ukraine,” National Security Adviser Mike Waltz said Thursday. The deal ensures that the U.S. will be “investing in the critical minerals, the rare-earth elements, that the United States needs and Ukraine needs for its future.”

“This deal was very important to the president,” Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, insisted. The “American taxpayer has provided” Ukraine with roughly $350 billon in support in its defensive war against Russian aggression, with no means of recouping its investment. “This money was just given and that’s it,” she added. Trump was “bothered” by that, and now Americans can expect “repayment.”

So, the minerals deal is simultaneously a signal to Russia that the U.S. will not abandon Ukraine, a means by which Ukraine can finance reconstruction in the postwar period, and a method by which the U.S. can extract recompense for its previous contributions to Ukrainian security. That’s one versatile deal.

Fortunately, Gabbard’s talking points in relation to this agreement are out of date. At the outset of the Trump administration’s push to secure the rights to Ukraine’s natural resources, the American position was that it would serve to “repay past military assistance” and would not be accompanied by guarantees for any future assistance.

The United States reluctantly withdrew that provision amid Kyiv’s objections. “The new deal does not include a previous US demand for retroactive compensation for more than $100bn in military support for Ukraine,” the Financial Times reported, “terms that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had consistently refused to accept.”

If Zelensky was constant, Washington’s terms were fluid throughout negotiations. According to the FT’s authoritative reporting on this process, the United States frequently altered and amended its requirements. Initially, Washington sought the rights to 50 percent of the revenues derived from the extraction of Ukraine’s mineral wealth (and, later, its hydrocarbon deposits). Suddenly, in late March, it wanted rights “to all mineral resources, including oil and gas, and major energy assets across the entire Ukrainian territory” (emphasis added). Washington prudently dropped that demand, too.

In addition, Ukraine objected to complicated provisions within the arrangement that would have frustrated Kyiv’s goal of accession into the European Union. “The Ukrainians also succeeded in removing language from the deal that would have complicated negotiations with the EU,” the FT observed.

The deal is not the shakedown that the White House initially envisioned. Ukraine retained the right to determine the natural resources that will be extracted on its territory. It will establish a “jointly managed” “reconstruction investment fund,” and, for the next ten years at least, profits generated by the fund will be reinvested in Ukraine.

And yet the deal still includes provisions that constitute extortion. “Although the agreement does not treat past aid to Ukraine as debt that the country needs to repay, it does say that future military aid, including weapons and training, will be treated as a U.S. contribution to the fund,” the New York Times reported, “meaning that Ukraine will need to match future aid with resource wealth.”

It’s a mystery as to why Moscow would look upon that provision as evidence in favor of Bessent’s claim that this deal cements America’s commitment to Ukraine’s future.

Indeed, the whole point of this exercise was to convince Donald Trump and those in his orbit who share his outlook that contributing to Europe’s defense against Russian aggression on the continent was worth it. The American national interests at stake didn’t move the needle. It was too much to ask that the administration preserve the normative proscription against redrawing borders by force of arms, or the desirability of degrading our adventurous adversary’s ability to threaten our allies and limit NATO’s freedom of action. America’s gains had to be tangible.

That was the impetus for the deal in the first place, and there is a logic to it. Unfortunately, for those of us who believe in America’s historic role as a champion of liberty that produces its own strategic rewards, the logic is rather sordid.

Honest defenders of this agreement maintain that, by getting Ukraine to cede a stake in its natural assets to the United States, Washington will lock itself into a relationship that it will be compelled to preserve (whether this or any future president likes it or not). Those material commitments are a better guarantee of Ukraine’s sovereignty than any negotiated security agreement.

That’s a fair point. As Ukraine’s bitter experience with the worthless Budapest Memorandum suggests, America is an unreliable partner in our shared goal of containing Russian expansionism in the absence of serious inducements. But even this agreement creates the conditions that could justify the administration’s barely suppressed desire to walk away from its commitments to Ukraine. That will be as obvious to Moscow as it is to us, so it’s not at all clear why the deal would render the Kremlin a more pliant negotiating partner.

Russian aggression is a problem for another day. Today, the Trump administration can claim victory for having solved the problem of Ukraine’s insistence on its own sovereignty as a virtue in and of itself. The promise of this deal is that it will cement the U.S.-Ukrainian partnership for the foreseeable future — one that will be typified by the peace that will follow from the pressure Washington will now, at long last, apply to Moscow. That happy outcome has yet to be determined.