Yes, Trump is vulgar. But the US global shakedown is the same one as ever

The US president looked like a gangster as he roughed up Zelensky. But he wasn’t the one who stoked a war that’s killed huge numbers of Ukrainians and Russians

[First published by Middle East Eye]

If there is one thing we can thank US President Donald Trump for, it is this: he has decisively stripped away the ridiculous notion, long cultivated by western media, that the United States is a benign global policeman enforcing a "rules-based order".

Washington is better understood as the head of a gangster empire, embracing 800 military bases around the world. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been aggressively seeking "global full-spectrum domination", as the Pentagon doctrine politely terms it.

You either pay fealty to the Don or you get dumped in the river. Last Friday Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was presented with a pair of designer concrete boots at the White House.

The innovation was that it all happened in front of the western press corps, in the Oval Office, rather than in a back room, out of sight. It made for great television, Trump crowed.

Pundits have been quick to reassure us that the shouting match was some kind of weird Trumpian thing. As though being inhospitable to state leaders, and disrespectful to the countries they head, is unique to this administration.

Take just the example of Iraq. The administration of Bill Clinton thought it "worth it" – as his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, infamously put it – to kill an estimated half a million Iraqi children by imposing draconian sanctions through the 1990s.

Under Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, the US then waged an illegal war in 2003, on entirely phoney grounds, that killed around half a million Iraqis, according to post-war estimates, and made four million homeless.

Those worrying about the White House publicly humiliating Zelensky might be better advised to save their concern for the hundreds of thousands of mostly Ukrainian and Russian men killed or wounded fighting an entirely unnecessary war – one, as we shall see, Washington carefully engineered through Nato over the preceding two decades.

Henchman Zelensky

All those casualties served the same goal as they did in Iraq: to remind the world who is boss.

Uniquely, western publics don’t understand this simple point because they live inside a disinformation bubble, created for them by the western establishment media.

Henry Kissinger, the long-time steward of US foreign policy, famously said: "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."

Zelensky just found that out the hard way. Gangster empires are just as fickle as the gangsters we know from Hollywood movies. Under the previous Joe Biden administration, Zelensky had been recruited as a henchman to do Washington’s bidding on Moscow’s doorstep.

The background – the one western media have kept largely out of view – is that, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US tore up treaties crucial to reassuring Russia of Nato’s good intent.

Viewed from Moscow, and given Washington’s track record, Nato’s European security umbrella must have looked more like preparation for an ambush.

Keen though Trump now is to rewrite history and cast himself as peacemaker, he was central to the escalating tensions that led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

In 2019, he unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That opened the door to the US launching a potential first strike on Russia, using missiles stationed in nearby Nato members Romania and Poland.

He also sent Javelin anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, a move avoided by his predecessor, Barack Obama, for fear it would be seen as provocative.

Repeatedly, Nato vowed to bring Ukraine into its fold, despite Russia’s warnings that the step was viewed as an existential threat, that Moscow could not allow Washington to place missiles on its border, any more than the US accepted Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba back in the early 1960s.

Washington pressed ahead anyway, even assisting in a colour revolution-style coup in 2014 against the elected government in Kyiv, whose crime was being a little too sympathetic to Moscow.

With the country in crisis, Zelensky was himself elected by Ukrainians as a peace candidate, there to end a brutal civil war – sparked by that coup – between anti-Russian, "nationalistic" forces in the country’s west and ethnic Russian populations in the east. The Ukrainian president soon broke that promise.

Trump has accused Zelensky of being a "dictator". But if he is, it is only because Washington wanted him that way, ignoring the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians.

Reddest of red lines

Zelensky’s job was to play a game of chicken with Moscow. The assumption was that the US would win whatever the outcome.

Either Russian President Vladimir Putin’s bluff would be called. Ukraine would be welcomed into Nato, becoming the most forward of the alliance’s forward bases against Russia, allowing nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to be stationed minutes from Moscow.

Or Putin would finally make good on his years of threats to invade his neighbour to stop Nato crossing the reddest of red lines he had set over Ukraine.

Washington could then cry "self-defence" on Ukraine’s behalf, and ludicrously fear-monger western publics about Putin eyeing Poland, Germany, France and Britain next.

Those were the pretexts for arming Kyiv to the hilt, rather than seeking a rapid peace deal. And so began a proxy war of attrition against Russia, using Ukrainian men as cannon fodder.

The aim was to wear Russia down militarily and economically, and bring about Putin’s overthrow.

Zelensky did precisely what was demanded of him. When he appeared to waver early on, and considered signing a peace deal with Moscow, Britain’s prime minister of the time, Boris Johnson, was dispatched with a message from Washington: keep fighting.

That is the same Boris Johnson who now breezily admits that the West is fighting a "proxy war" against Russia.

His comments have generated precisely no controversy. That is particularly strange, given that critics who pointed this very obvious fact out three years ago were instantly denounced for spreading "Putin disinformation" and Kremlin "talking points".

For his obedience, Zelensky was feted a hero, the defender of Europe against Russian imperialism. His every "demand" – demands that originated in Washington – was met.

Ukraine has received at least $250bn worth of guns, tanks, fighter jets, training for his troops, western intelligence on Russia, and other forms of aid.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men have paid with their lives – as have the families they leave behind.

Mafia etiquette

Now the old Don in Washington is gone. The new Don has decided Zelensky has been an expensive failure. Russia isn’t lethally wounded. It’s stronger than ever. Time for a new strategy.

Zelensky, still imagining he was Washington’s favourite henchman, arrived at the Oval Office only to be taught a harsh lesson in mafia etiquette.

Trump is spinning his stab in the back as a "peace agreement". And in some sense, it is. Rightly, Trump has concluded that Russia has won – unless the West is ready to fight World War III and risk a potential nuclear war.

Trump has faced up to the reality of the situation, even if Zelensky and Europe are still struggling to.

But his plan for Ukraine is actually just a variation of his other peace plan – the one for Gaza. There he wants to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population and, on the bodies of the enclave’s many thousands of dead children, build the "Riviera of the Middle East" – or "Trump Gaza" as it is being called in a surreal video he shared on social media.

Similarly, Trump now sees Ukraine not as a military battlefield but as an economic one where, through clever deal-making, he can leverage riches for himself and his billionaire pals.

He has put a gun to Zelensky and Europe’s head. Make a deal with Russia to end the war, or you are on your own against a far superior military power. See if the Europeans can help you without a supply of Washington’s weapons.

Not surprisingly, Zelensky, Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron huddled together at the weekend to find a deal that would appease Trump. All Starmer has revealed so far is that the plan will "stop the fighting".

That is a good thing. But the fighting could have been stopped, and should have been stopped, three years ago.

Money, not peace

It is deeply unwise to be lulled into tribalism by all this – the very tribalism western elites seek to cultivate among their publics to keep us treating international affairs no differently from a high-stakes football match.

No one here has behaved, or is behaving, honourably.

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately.

An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

Zelensky now understands this. He knows that he, and the people of Ukraine, have been scammed. That is what tends to happen when you cosy up to the mafia.

If anyone doubts Washington’s insincerity over Ukraine, look to Palestine for clarity.

In his earlier presidency, Trump tried to bring about what he termed the peace "deal of the century” whose centrepiece was the annexation of much of the Occupied West Bank.

The hope was that the Gulf states would ultimately fund an incentivisation programme – the carrot to Israel’s stick – to encourage Palestinians to make a new life in a giant, purpose-built industrial zone in Sinai, next to Gaza.

That plan is still simmering away in the background. At the weekend, Israel received a green light from Washington to revive its genocidal starvation of Gaza’s population, after Israel refused to negotiate the second phase of the original ceasefire agreement.

The Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are now spinning their own bad faith as Hamas "rejectionism".

They and the echo chamber that is the western media are blaming the Palestinian group for refusing to be gulled into an "extension" of what was never more than a phoney ceasefire – Israel’s fire never ceased. Israel wants all the hostages back, without having to leave Gaza, so that Hamas has no leverage to stop Israel reviving the full genocide.

The people of Gaza are still being fed into the Washington mafia’s meatgrinder, just as the Ukrainian people have been.

Trump wants them out of the way so he can develop a Mediterranean playground for the rich, paid for with Gulf oil money and the so-far untapped natural gas reserves just off Gaza’s coast.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t pretend that Ukraine and Gaza are anything more than geostrategic real estate for Washington.

The big shakedown

Zelensky’s shakedown did not come out of the blue. Trump and his officials had been flagging it well in advance.

Two weeks ago, the industrial correspondent for Britain’s Daily Telegraph wrote an article headlined “Here’s why Trump wants to make Ukraine a US economic colony”.

Trump’s team believes that Ukraine may have rare-earth minerals under the ground worth some $15 trillion – a treasure trove that will be critical to the development of the next generation of technology.

In their view, controlling the exploration and extraction of those minerals will be as important as control over the Middle East’s oil reserves was more than a century ago.

And most important of all, the US wants China, its chief economic – if not military – rival excluded from the plunder. China currently has an effective monopoly on many of these critical minerals.

Or as the Telegraph puts it, Ukraine’s “minerals offer a tantalising promise: the ability for the US to break its dependence on Chinese supplies of critical minerals that go into everything from wind turbines to iPhones and stealth fighter jets”.

A draft of the plan seen by the Telegraph would, in its words, “amount to the US economic colonisation of Ukraine, in legal perpetuity".

Washington wants first refusal on all deposits within the country.

At their Oval Office confrontation, Trump reiterated this goal: "So we're going to be using that [Ukraine’s rare earth minerals], taking it, using it for all of the things we do, including AI, and including weapons, and the military. And it's really going to very much satisfy our needs."

All of this means that Trump has a keen incentive to get the war finished as quickly as possible, and Russia’s territorial advance halted. The more territory Moscow seizes, the less territory is left for the US to plunder.

Self-sabotage

The battle against China over rare-earth minerals isn’t a Trump innovation either – and adds an additional layer of context for why Washington and Nato have been so keen over the past two decades to prise Ukraine away from Russia.

Last summer, a Congressional select committee on competition with China announced the formation of a working group to counter Beijing’s "dominance of critical minerals".

The chairman of the committee, John Moolenaar, noted that the current US dependence on China for these minerals “would quickly become an existential vulnerability in the event of a conflict”.

Another committee member, Rob Wittman, observed: “Dominance over global supply chains for critical mineral and rare earth elements is the next stage of great power competition.”

What Trump appears to appreciate is that Nato’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has, by default, driven Moscow deeper into Beijing’s embrace. It has been self-sabotage on a grand scale.

Together, China and Russia are a formidable opponent, and one at the centre of the ever-growing Brics group – comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. They have been seeking to expand their alliance by adding emerging powers to become a counterweight to Washington and Nato’s bullying global agenda.

But a deal with Putin over Ukraine would provide an opportunity for Washington to build a new security architecture in Europe – one more useful to the US – that places Russia inside the tent rather than outside it.

That would leave China isolated – a long-time Pentagon goal.

And it would also leave Europe less central to the projection of US power, which is why European leaders – led by Keir Starmer – have been looking and sounding so unnerved over the past few weeks.

The danger is that Trump’s "peacemaking" in Ukraine simply becomes a prelude to the fomenting of a war against China, using Taiwan as the pretext in the same way Ukraine was used against Russia.

As Moolenaar implied, US control over critical minerals – in Ukraine and elsewhere – would ensure the US was no longer vulnerable in the event of a war with China to losing access to the minerals it would need to continue the war. It would free Washington’s hand.

Trump may be behaving in a vulgar manner. But the gangster empire he now heads is conducting the same global shakedown as ever.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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