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:
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