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The long-debated “minerals deal” was finally signed between the US and Ukraine late Wednesday, after a months-long, whiplash-producing back and forth between the two parties. In the end, Wednesday started with an affirmation that the deal would be signed, then by mid-day we were told that the Ukraine government aircraft turned around mid-flight and the deal was off, and then later in the afternoon the deal was finally actually signed. That is the chaos that is Trump 2.0 foreign policy in these early days of the Administration.
The “minerals deal” that was eventually signed was billed as a miraculous breakthrough, an amazing journey from the dramatic confrontation between the US president and vice president and Zelensky in the Oval Office just weeks ago, to the point where President Trump can raise high his trophy: the signed minerals deal for which an enormous amount of US diplomatic effort has been spent!
But the deal signed Wednesday in no way resembles the original “rare earths” deal touted by President Trump just a few weeks ago. Recall that when first launched this “deal” was a way for Ukraine to “pay back” the United States for $350 billion in assistance as calculated by the Trump people. The number is only accurate if one goes back to the US-backed coup in 2014, and, ironically, through the first Trump term (where for the first time offensive weapons were provided), and past the Biden largesse after Russia’s launch of its “special military operation” in February of 2022.
And it was a payback in the “rare earths” minerals said to be so critical to our technological society that had heretofore been supplied by “adversaries” like China for which many in the Trump foreign policy team were preparing to target as soon as they solved the Ukraine issue.
The great negotiator Trump was to secure the “rare earths” minerals from Ukraine that would for certainty be withheld or forbidden when the real strategy of “confronting” China was put into place.
But it’s all kabuki theater. First off, Trump people dropped the demand that US aid to Ukraine to the tune of a third of a trillion dollars needed to be paid back. That was the backbone and rationale of the deal in the first place. No, just days ago it was determined that we would start with a clean slate with Ukraine.
Once again – as with the “Liberation Day” tariff war – maximalist demands were made, proved incredibly disruptive, and then were inexplicably reversed suddenly days later.
“Just kidding.”
And now that the “minerals deal” was finally signed to great fanfare, it turns out that it was not about “rare earths” minerals at all. As Energy and commodities columnist at Bloomberg Javier Blas reported, after looking at the radically restructured “rare earths” deal posted on X, the “deal” is primarily about “oil, natural gas and a bit of aluminum.” He added, “And the critical minerals? Rare earths?”
Even the supposed harsh terms turn out to be a paper tiger:
– The US has no say under the agreement on when or what gets extracted in Ukraine
– Both countries invest equally into an ‘investment fund’
– No debts for past aid are acknowledged
– The US will not see a single dollar from the investment, in the best circumstances, for 10 YEARS
We’ve seen this movie before. Stealing oil from Syria and Iraq with negligible benefit to American citizens that was initially touted as a way to pay them back for our financing regime change wars. But only the well-connected Beltway parasites were well-paid.
The ludicrous “rare earths minerals deal” is a microcosm of how absurd the Trump Administration’s policy has been on the US/Russia war through proxy Ukraine in the first place.
One of the most dangerous and counter-productive additions to the new “minerals deal” is a provision that US military assistance shipped to Ukraine will go into the joint investment fund on the plus-side of the US ledger. In other words, this “breakthrough” has opened the door for the US to return to the Biden policy of endless weapons supplied to a nearly supine nation…with a promise to “pay you back” once minerals are extracted from what remains of Ukraine soil. This will serve to prolong the war that Trump claims he wants to end.
As longtime analyst Brian Berletic – with a solid track record of accuracy – wrote last week, “Today, the US government is attempting to play the role of a frustrated mediator trying to broker peace between Ukraine and Russia, when in reality this was always a war between the US and Russia.”
Perhaps driven by hubris and an obsession with vainglory, President Trump is desperate to be able to take credit for “solving” a completely fictional Ukraine/Russia war. Any doctor worth his salt would tell you that there is no way you can treat the disease if you misdiagnose the symptoms, but here we are with an Administration hypnotized by the neocon-created fantasy of a sudden attack – without antecedent – by Russia on its neighbor as a blatant land grab mixed equally with a desire to express bestial cruelty.
The only way they can sell this neocon fever dream is to reimagine Russian President Putin as a kind of golem-like figure who suddenly wakes up in the morning and decides who and how many to kill that day.
In fact this entire chapter of post-Cold War US foreign policy is defined by a desperate search for relatively easy dragons abroad to slay while sharpening our fangs to take down rival number two, Russia, with an eye on rival number one, an ascendant China.
But something happened on the road to unipolar victory: through the bad joke called NATO, the US threw everything in its arsenal short of nuclear weapons at Russia in Ukraine and it lost. In a United States thankfully defended by a wonderful geography of two protective oceans, it may be hard for our fellow citizens to understand what an existential war may look like.
Indeed, even WWII was a kind of crusade to save Europe from its own excesses. We were never threatened by Hitler or any of his riff-raff. Jews were totally safe in the US.
Russia on the other hand came to know up close and personal the murderous intent of the Nazis, and for the Soviet Union it was a matter of life and death – and we are talking tens of millions of lives – that savage Hitler with his view that Slavs were untermensch to be eliminated must be defeated.
Life or death. Americans have not faced that since, arguably, the Civil War.
So here we are in an absolutely AI kind of artificial reality where the early Trump 2.0 Administration is expending extraordinarily amounts of political, diplomatic, and other multi-layer efforts to maintain a fiction that Trump can wave his wand and remove animosity between Ukraine and Russia when all the time it was the US who was at war behind the shadows.
As the process becomes increasingly less attuned to the reality on the ground – thanks in large part to a reverse Walter Durranty-level fantasist called “General Kellogg” who for some bizarre reason continues to dominate the debate with his asinine “plan” published with neocon Fred Fleitz last April – Trump’s chimeric admonitions to his Russian counterpart to “just stop shooting” belie a kind of desperation that is doomed to fail. And he knows it.
Russia is fighting for its survival. Neocons are surfing on Ukrainian blood to “take down” Russia.
That’s it. That’s the war.
So how can President Trump square this ginormous circle and escape the traps and spider webs woven for him by all the neocons he has again hired to direct his foreign policy?
Ron Paul is often dismissed as jejune for his bons mots like “we just marched in we can just march home.” However in systems analysis many times it turns out that the simplest solution is the best solution. President Trump can end the war in Ukraine in a day (as he once promised) by simply announcing that it is not his war and he will no longer have anything to do with it.
That means no shuttle diplomacy with absurd plans, no more Steve Witkoff trafficking in Kellogg’s gilded turds. Simply a recognition of reality: literally no American who voted for Trump to save them from Biden’s inflation and woke tyranny could give a flying fornication who rules Ukraine or how it gets along with Russia. Polls back this idea as well.
To win Ukraine, Trump must wash his hands, Pontius Pilate-like, of the whole affair.
The neocons who have again steadied their swagger in Trump 2.0 love to revise the “peace through strength” mantra, as if they are the heirs of Reagan. But the real strength that brings on peace is the strength to stand up to all the Beltway neocons and desktop warriors and say, “enough.”
“This is not my war and I want to have nothing to do with it. Americans elected me to bring jobs to Middle America, not to pursue a crusade for the bloodthirsty neocon elite who fantasize of using American might to right all their perceived historical wrongs.”
America first is the real and only solution to the Ukraine problem.
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