A Belgian Congo Plan for Ukraine

Plus a conversation with Phillips O’Brien

Tuesday was a travel day with not much time for writing, so this post will be somewhat different in structure from the usual format. I’ll begin with a relatively brief discussion of Donald Trump’s proposal to Ukraine, which was both depraved and stupid. I’ll follow with a video discussion I had with Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies and military historian who had a profound influence on my own thinking even before Putin invaded Ukraine and has been one of the best people to follow to understand what’s happening since the war began.

First, about Trump’s proposal to Ukraine. I don’t think we should call it a “deal.” After all, isn’t a deal something in which both sides bring something to the table? What Trump suggested was that Ukraine give the United States half of the revenue it gets from resource extraction, as far as I can tell in perpetuity. Trump suggested that this would amount to $500 billion, although this seems like a wildly exaggerated sum.

In return, Trump offered, well, zero. No additional aid, no security guarantees, no nothing.

Many of us look at Ukraine and see a nation heroically defending freedom against heavy odds, receiving arms and money from the world’s democracies but doing all the fighting and dying — a nation that deserves our deepest gratitude. Trump, however, apparently thinks that America’s past aid — which has been substantial, although Europe has given considerably more — entitles us to strip Ukraine of its wealth.

Some observers have compared the Trump proposal to the reparations the victorious allies demanded from Germany after World War I — a demand that yielded very little money to the victors but enraged the Germans and played a role in the rise of Hitler.

But Trump’s vision reminds me more of old-fashioned imperialism, in which powerful nations tried to seize the wealth of less-powerful nations just because they could. This doesn’t look to me like Weimar Germany in the 1920s; it looks like the Belgian Congo in the late 19^th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory.

Trying to carry out that kind of exploitation in the 21^st century, in a nation that, once again, has been fighting for our freedom, is just depraved. So it seems almost inappropriate to point out that it’s also deeply stupid.

I wrote a couple of months ago about an old book by Norman Angell, The Great Illusion. Even in 1909 Angell argued, correctly, that conquest no longer paid. In a world in which a nation’s wealth rests on its ability to produce goods and services, seizing another country’s resources can never be worth enough to justify the money and blood expended to carry out the theft. Suppose that we indulge Trump’s fantasy that we could extract $500 billion — two and a half times Ukraine’s prewar annual GDP! — from the beleaguered nation. That would still be only 1.7 percent of annual U.S. GDP, and it would be spread over many years, so it would at most add a small fraction of one percent to U.S. national income.

Anyway, there’s no way we could actually get the money. If Ukraine were to lose, and Putin takes over, he wouldn’t honor the deal. If Ukraine were to survive, its populace would be even more enraged than the Germans after World War I, and they wouldn’t pay either.

And the price of this depravity would be to mark America irrevocably as a rogue nation, one nobody will want to deal with and nobody will trust to honor its promises.

Yet some reports suggest that Trump officials were surprised that Zelensky rejected the proposal.

Let me stop there, and tell you about the video.

Phillips O’Brien is, as I said, a military historian who teaches at the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland (although as you’ll immediately notice, he’s American by birth.) His latest book, The Strategists, is fascinating. But I first noticed his work when I read his 2015 book How the War Was Won, which transformed my understanding of what really happened in World War II. Much of what he said there has turned out to be hugely important in understanding the Ukraine war too, and I’ve depended a lot on his Substack to make sense of events.

Our conversation ranged over a variety of topics; he even forced me to talk a bit about economics. So here’s something to watch: