Instead of supporting an ally, we're trying to bully them into an economic deal that would be crippling for their country, and emboldening Russia and other autocracies in the process. This is the problem with Trump's view of international diplomacy as boardroom deal making. The goal in international diplomacy isn't just to extract the best terms out of your negotiating partner; it's to build the relationships and alliances that help ensure world peace. We will rue the day when America started to tell its allies that it doesn't care what happens to them.
Anne Applebaum writes well about it here:
Trump and Vance are sending a dark message to America’s allies.
www.theatlantic.com
From the link:
“… A few days before the Munich conference, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went to Kyiv and presented President Volodymyr Zelensky with a two-page document and asked him to sign. Details of this proposed agreement
began to leak last weekend.
It calls for the U.S. to take 50 percent of all “economic value associated with resources of Ukraine,” including “mineral resources, oil and gas resources, ports, other infrastructure,” not just now but forever, as
the British newspaper The Telegraph reported and others confirmed: “For all future licenses the U.S. will have a right of first refusal for the purchase of exportable minerals,” the document says.
Europeans have contributed more resources to Ukraine’s military and economic survival than the U.S. has—despite Trump’s
repeated, untruthful claims to the contrary—but would presumably be cut out of this deal.
The Ukrainians, who have suffered hundreds of thousands of military and civilian casualties, whose cities have been turned to rubble, whose national finances have been decimated, and whose personal lives have been disrupted, are offered nothing in exchange for half their wealth: no security guarantees, no investment.
The cruelty of the document is remarkable, as are its ambiguities. People who have seen it say that it does not explain exactly which Americans would be the beneficiaries of this deal. Perhaps the American government? Perhaps the president’s friends and business partners? … But the document at least served to reiterate Vance’s message, and to add a new element: The U.S. doesn’t need or want allies—unless they can pay.
…Trump is demonstrating that he can and will align himself with whomever he wants—
Vladimir Putin,
Mohammed bin Salman, perhaps
eventually with Xi Jinping—in defiance of past treaties and agreements. In order to bully Ukraine into signing unfavorable deals, he is even willing to distort reality.
In these circumstances, everything is up for grabs, any relationship is subject to bargaining. Zelensky knows this already: It was he who originally proposed giving Americans access to rare-earth metals, in order to appeal to a transactional U.S. president, although without imagining that the concession would be in exchange for nothing. …”
