Batten down the hatches, Uncle Sam wants a deal

It is far from obvious that insulting Zelensky in the glare of TV cameras and sending him packing from his meeting with Trump at the White House was the best way to end the war.

After demanding 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth in return for the military aid that the US had extended Ukraine over the three years of its ongoing war with Russia, what will the US want next, in return for the money it spends on military bases in other parts of the world? 50 percent of Samsung and LG for protecting South Korea from the nuclear missiles of North Korea, and 50 percent of Toyota and Soni to recover the cost of maintaining a US base in Okinawa?

By seeking compensation for providing strategic security to countries, US President Donald Trump is effectively repositioning the US armed forces as the world’s largest and most expensive mercenary force, whether he would like to admit that or not.

Zelensky’s public humiliation

Even those who fundamentally agree that Ukraine has to make territorial concessions to secure an end to the war that is currently ravaging the country would agree that Trump’s treatment of visiting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was atrocious. The war is killing Ukrainian and Russian soldiers, keeping energy and food prices above where these could be for the entire world, and creating social division across Europe, and must come to an end. However, it is far from obvious that insulting Zelensky in the glare of TV cameras and sending him packing from his meeting with Trump at the White House was the best way to end the war. Zelensky has been told that he should come back when he is prepared to make a deal.

Watch: Ukraine envoy's facepalm gesture during Trump-Zelenskyy blowup at White House 

For Trump a ceasefire in Ukraine is not the core of the deal he wants the country to sign. He has proposed that Ukraine should sign over to the US half the rights to Ukraine’s mineral wealth. In particular, Trump wants the rare earths that Ukraine has and the US does not. We have plenty of oil and gas in our country, said Trump, but we don’t have the rare earths. Rare earths are a bunch of minerals vital for manufacturing electronics, the permanent magnets at the heart of induction motors used by some electric cars, and defence equipment.

Nobody bargains with Uncle Sam

Zelensky had objected to what he described as selling his state. He had come around to accepting some kind of a fund, into which the returns from developing the nation’s mineral wealth would flow. How this money would be utilized, including whether it would be used to pay the US government for the military and other aid it had given Ukraine in the past, was to be firmed up.

This was not to President Trump’s liking. Ukraine was in no position to bargain, and demand concessions – that has been the message various emissaries of the US government to Kiev have been making in the recent past. You have to sign the deal, President Trump insisted during his melodramatic interaction with Zelensky.

Messy personal history

Trump has a beef with Zelensky, going back to his first term as President. He had wanted Zelensky to incriminate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, alleging impropriety in various deals struck between the US and Ukraine in the past, when Biden had been US Vice President. Trump threatened to hold back some arms shipments, in case Zelensky did not oblige. Zelensky did not oblige, and Trump got impeached for his unlawful behaviour.

Hard power undergirds the US-led world order

The US has underpinned the world order formed after World War II its unmatched military power. That power was wielded through its military alliances such as NATO,  military spending that is larger than that of the next seven largest military budgets put together, through power projection using inter-continental ballistic missiles with nuclear payloads, naval fleets with giant aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered submarines that do not need to frequently come to the surface for fuelling up, and armies of satellites that track and guide all military assets, whether of friend or foe,  and military bases around the world.

Trump and his America-first crowd have expressed the sentiment that there is no reason for the US to carry the burden of defending the free world. It wants its NATO allies to raise their own defence budgets and for countries where bases are located to pay for their upkeep.

Ukraine as a proxy in US-Russia rivalry

In the case of Ukraine, the US, under Obama, Trump and Biden, was fighting a proxy war to weaken Russia into strategic insignificance, first by extending NATO membership to Ukraine, effectively bringing Russia’s warm water naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea, under NATO control. When Putin moved to take Crimea and, later, the eastern parts of Ukraine through which the land route to Crimea from Moscow or St Petersburg runs, the US and its NATO allies armed Ukrainian soldiers to fight and die. Ukraine was fighting to defend its territory, but the US and NATO allies were using Ukrainian soldiers and Ukrainian civilians as pawns in the larger cause of eliminating Russia as a global power.

Trump’s transactional approach to strategic deployments of American military might be ill-suited for sustaining consensus on keeping the US as ‘the leader of the free world’, but then, why insist on consensus, when funds can be extracted from allies to Make America Great Again?

So, Samsung, Toyota, watch out.