Sunanda K. Datta-Ray | Trump’s Ukraine gambit to make Europe the real loser

If Ukraine is finding the cost of war unbearable, US President Donald Trump’s demand for a $500 billion “payback” warns that the price of peace can be no less crippling. European analysts argue that the US President’s draft contract would turn Ukraine into an American economic colony for years to come. Not only do Mr Trump’s terms go far beyond US control of the country’s critical minerals, including ports, infrastructure, oil and gas, and rare earth minerals, but are harsher than the financial sanctions imposed on Germany and Japan following their defeat in the Second World War.

Not that European leaders are entirely honest in echoing the outrage and astonishment of the 47-year-old ethnic Jewish professional comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was elected Ukraine’s President in 2019 and has since ruled his country with extraordinary courage, although Mr Trump dismisses him as a despised “dictator” and blames him for the three-year-long war.

As long ago as 1948, George Kennan, the American state department’s first director of planning, foresaw the Soviet Union’s collapse and predicted that no Russian government would ever accept Ukrainian independence. The remarkably prescient Kennan is wrongly called the father of containment. Fearing that the American media’s need for an enemy, coupled with US militarism, especially the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s eastward expansion, would be the trigger to destroy liberal trends in Russia, plunge the world in a new Cold War, and threaten escalation into nuclear conflict, he advocated peaceful competition instead of military pressure.

The current spurt of hectic diplomatic activity -- the Munich Security Conference, negotiations in Riyadh under Saudi Arabian auspices and talks in Ankara, where Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reaffirmed full support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, while offering to host future negotiations between Mr Zelenskyy, Russia and the United States -- appeared to substantiate Kennan’s fears by sending out dire messages. The first was that the trans-Atlantic alliance is tottering. Second, the US cannot be relied on to go to the aid of a beleaguered Europe as it did in the two world wars. Third, the Trump Doctrine would seem to reverse what was called the “big stick ideology”, the corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that the 26th US President, Theodore Roosevelt, had articulated with the advice: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far”.

The 47th US President seems determined to mollycoddle Russia’s President Vladimir Putin by branding Mr Zelenskyy as the aggressor, and not only abandoning Ukraine but crippling it financially by demanding a 50 per cent share of the revenues from its natural resources, ports, and infrastructure as compensation for the $500 billion that Mr Trump claims Washington gave Kyiv for its war effort. The demand is thinly disguised as a “joint investment fund”, supposedly to ensure that “hostile parties to the conflict do not benefit from the

reconstruction of Ukraine”. The fund would have extensive control over Ukraine’s resources.

Kyiv itself has long insisted that the only way to resolve concern about Ukraine’s future is Nato membership as part of an eventual peace deal. The organisation’s first secretary-general, Lionel Ismay (Lord Hastings), who famously said that Nato was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down” would probably have endorsed a view that highlights the alliance’s cornerstone -- Article 5 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, embodying the “one for all, and all for one” commitment as in Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. When one of the 32 Nato members suffers an armed attack, all others are expected to go to its assistance. This shifts the responsibility for preventing a future war to the United States, thereby saving Europe the cost of men and weapons as well as intense suffering.

Mr Trump has said nothing about scrapping Article 5. But his scepticism about Nato membership for Ukraine is neither new nor unique. Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s gallant offer to send British troops to Ukraine, many European leaders, notably in Germany, expressed doubts as long ago as the 2008 Bucharest summit when European governments resisted George W. Bush’s attempts to offer Ukraine and Georgia a path to Nato membership. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago, following the seizure and subsequent annexation of the Crimea peninsula, made Ukrainian membership additionally difficult. It would commit the US and European governments to do what they have tried so hard to avoid all along – engage in a direct confrontation with Russia on Ukraine’s behalf.

With Nato off the table, and the US refusing to send troops, discussion in European policy circles focused on providing a security guarantee for Ukraine that replicates but does not require Nato membership. Some agreements are already in place -- France, Poland and Britain have signed bilateral security cooperation agreements with Ukraine, mostly related to weapons or training. Any commitments to provide troops, however, have been less forthcoming, although private discussions on uniformed deployments are continuing. But France’s President Emmanuel Macron -- the only European leader who had previously pledged troops -- has become equivocal while Poland, once a vocal Ukraine supporter, now flatly refuses to send troops.

Not that all problems would disappear even if European states do agree to put boots on the ground. The frontline in Ukraine is over 500 miles long; Ukraine’s borders with Russia and Belarus are over 2,000 miles long. Various military assessments suggest that between 40,000 and 200,000 troops would be needed to enforce the peace and to deter Russia from future attack. With the upper end of that scale simply not feasible, the current talks are focused near the low end, on a proposed deployment of around 50,000 European troops.

Even this would be a significant resource burden for European nations, requiring them to withdraw peacekeepers from other conflicts and ignore Nato’s own defence needs. It would mean an additional responsibility for European forces at a time they are being asked to take over defence burdens from the US. Nor is there any guarantee that such a force would suffice to deter Russia. It could even drag Europe into a new war. But whether or not Russia sees a European force as a provocation, without such a force, Europe is virtually defenceless.

If Ukraine is still independent and fighting under the intrepid Mr Zelenskyy, it’s only because of the assurance of outside support in the event of a showdown with Russia.