US President Donald Trump has been attempting to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine. This should have been welcome news for everyone, and especially for war-torn Ukraine. Who is better than the author of The Art of the Deal to ensure that Ukraine, America’s erstwhile ally, would get the best possible terms for peace?
If you watched the train wreck of Trump’s very public White House meeting with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb 28, you will know that things are a little more complicated. The meeting started off calmly enough, with Trump welcoming Zelensky and proclaiming his desire for peace. As usual, Trump’s comments were punctuated by his trademark sideswipes at previous presidents and his repeated assertions that the war would “never have happened” if he’d been president. However, unlike in Trump’s two previous meetings that week, first with French President Emmanuel Macron, and then with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Zelensky wasn’t there to play the role of sycophant. His attempts to explain his point of view about the war triggered a shockingly hostile response from Trump and his vice-president, JD Vance, shouting down the Ukrainian president and accusing him of being disrespectful. The acrimonious meeting ended abruptly, followed by Zelensky being unceremoniously ejected from the White House.
So much for the gentle art of diplomacy. Whether Trump’s loss of temper during the meeting was genuine, or an orchestrated attempt to put pressure on Zelensky, we’ll never know. What is clear, however, is that Trump has his own “America first” agenda on Ukraine. This was apparent from the very outset of Trump’s preliminary peace negotiations, when he seemed to sideline Ukraine and immediately accept Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands. These included the key demands that Russia would retain Ukrainian territory already under its control and that Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO. Even if you think that these demands are reasonable or that Trump was merely being realistic, it seems strange that the great dealmaker should have made such comprehensive concessions at the very outset of negotiations. Equally surprising was the contrast between Trump’s warm remarks about Putin and his criticism of Zelensky. Not only did Trump blame Zelensky for starting the war, but also called him a “dictator” who is “very low in Ukrainian polls” and who “has done a terrible job”. This was not the language you would expect from an impartial broker that both sides could trust to negotiate fair peace terms.
If all this sounded like the author of The Art of the Deal had finally lost the plot, think again. We have to remember that more than anything else Trump is a businessman whose natural instinct is to make deals that generate profit. This is the key to understanding his policy on Ukraine. I’m sure Trump is sincere about wanting to broker peace, bolstering his nomination for the coveted Nobel Peace Prize. However, his business priority is to assert America’s financial interests. Ending US military support for Ukraine and distancing himself from his NATO allies will cut US overseas spending and allow funding to be diverted internally in support of his “America first” agenda. Even more significant is his focus on a deal that will give the US generous rights to Ukraine’s valuable mineral deposits. The prospect of a minerals deal was floated last year by Zelensky as an incentive for the US to continue its support for Ukraine. Trump has eagerly seized on the idea with an apparent determination to extract the most generous possible terms for the US.
This may explain Trump’s early support for Russian demands and his hostile stance toward Zelensky. It reminded me of classic intimidation tactics — give me a favorable deal on minerals or suffer the consequences. Trump initially demanded $500 billion in mineral wealth from Ukraine, equivalent to half the country’s mineral resources, as “payback” for earlier US aid during the war. Zelensky rejected this, saying that the US had supplied much less in aid and had also offered no security guarantees for Ukraine once the war ends.
This is the context for Trump’s efforts to broker peace. Everyone wants peace in Ukraine, but the price Trump is trying to extract is a profitable minerals deal rooted both in his transactional business approach and in the long American history of demanding “payback” for wartime aid
According to Reuters, Trump’s negotiators responded by stepping up the pressure on Zelensky, threatening to disconnect Ukraine from Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet system if no minerals deal could be reached. Ukraine’s armed forces depend on the system to provide real-time video drone footage of the battlefield and to conduct accurate strikes against Russian targets. Ukrainian officials, quoted by The Guardian, described the threat as “blackmail”, saying it would have a catastrophic impact on front-line Ukrainian combat units. The threat to Ukraine was compounded by the fact that the Russian military also uses Starlink. If Musk’s SpaceX company did switch off Ukrainian access, while continuing to offer it to Russia, the US would have effectively switched sides in the war, throwing its technological support behind Moscow.
This pressure on Ukraine to make a deal was accompanied by a further hike in US demands, according to The New York Times. The newspaper reported on a revised draft of the deal, dated Feb 21, in which the White House was now demanding half of Ukraine’s revenues from natural resources, including minerals, gas and oil, as well as earnings from ports and other infrastructure. Zelensky responded by saying that his team was working with the US on a draft agreement on minerals and that he was hoping for “a fair result”.
What seems clear is that the hard-line US pressure on Zelensky was a deliberate ploy. It was intended to realize one of Trump’s key aims in the overall peace negotiations — to make a favorable deal for America that, in Trump’s own words, would “get our money back”. As we all now know from Zelensky’s disastrous meeting with Trump on Feb 28, the ploy has only partially worked so far. A draft minerals deal was indeed agreed on, intended to be signed by Trump and Zelensky immediately after their aborted meeting. There is much speculation on why the deal was derailed at the eleventh hour in what may come to be known as the 2025 “White House Crash”. It appears that Zelensky’s obstinate insistence on potentially costly security guarantees from the US was a dealbreaker for Trump and his strings-free “Make a deal or we’re out” approach.
Of course, there are other possible explanations for the White House debacle. In addition to pressurizing Zelensky for a strings-free minerals deal, Trump may have been trying to encourage Putin to offer a similar or better deal; he may also have been swayed by his greater empathy toward Putin as a “strong leader”; or at a more petty, personal level, he may have wanted to humiliate Zelensky in revenge for events leading up to Trump’s 2019 impeachment, when, allegedly, Trump had unsuccessfully pressed Zelensky to investigate allegations about Joe and Hunter Biden. Any combination of these factors could help explain the White House meltdown. Alternatively, it could simply have been an unintended consequence of the irresponsible decision to conduct sensitive peace negotiations not in private, but in the full glare of the world’s press and television cameras.
Whatever the cause of the meltdown, we really shouldn’t be too surprised at America’s asset-grabbing approach to the peace negotiations. It reflects Trump’s business background and is also in keeping with American policy going back decades. Since the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, there have often been strings attached to US military aid. In World War II, lend-lease provided US allies, predominantly the UK, with military hardware and other essential supplies on the condition that these would be returned or repaid after the war. The financial burden this placed on the UK in the postwar period, on top of its losses during the war, effectively bankrupted the country. It accelerated the UK’s decline as a major world power, hastened the breakup of the British Empire, and paved the way for the US to become a superpower. The UK was finally able to pay off its lend-lease financial debt to the US in 2006. War had proved to be a very lucrative proposition for the US.
In the years since World War II, the profits to be made from warfare have been central to the American economy. In 1961, the strong link between US arms manufacturers and the government was dubbed by then-president Dwight Eisenhower as “the military-industrial complex”. This is still a powerful economic sector in the US, which is home to four of the five largest private arms companies in the world: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. The US accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s weapons exports, with arms sales totaling approximately $200 billion per year. As the world’s biggest arms dealer, the US is clearly a beneficiary of war.
This manifests itself in profits from direct arms sales to countries around the world, but there are also more insidious ways to benefit from being an international arms dealer. Supply weaponry to desperate countries that are at war, then broker a peace that obliges those countries to repay a high price for that weaponry.
This modus operandi, now being attempted with Ukraine, is profitable for the US on three different levels. First, the American arms industry has been supported, generating jobs and company profits, all of which have boosted the American economy and provided tax revenue. Second, the military equipment that was sent to Ukraine came from the US arsenal stockpile. This was then replenished with the latest, most up-to-date weaponry, benefiting the US by ensuring its own arsenal is always stocked with the most advanced equipment. Third, by using top-dollar valuations of the military equipment it has provided for Ukraine, the US has created leverage in its demands for substantial Ukrainian mineral and other resources.
This is the context for Trump’s efforts to broker peace. Everyone wants peace in Ukraine, but the price Trump is trying to extract is a profitable minerals deal rooted both in his transactional business approach and in the long American history of demanding “payback” for wartime aid. What’s new this time isn’t Trump’s pursuit of a profitable peace deal, but his brutal honesty about this blatantly commercial objective. Whether he achieves this objective is now uncertain after the Trump-Zelensky White House debacle, but it’s clear that Trump will not be satisfied until he’s able to present a minerals deal to the American people that he can portray as a great “America first” deal.
The author is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
