#WTH Ukraine can afford to fight Putin

Trillions in mineral wealth can belong to an American ally, or be taken by Russia

The United States has never been a colonial power, and has never taken tribute from conquered nations. To the contrary, America’s most dramatic victory — in World War II — was followed by years of reconstruction and support for the vanquished. In part, this was the lesson of the First World War, and the perception that the exacting Versailles Treaty was a mistake that sowed the seeds of the rise of the Third Reich. No matter what the roots of that post-WWII era, however, there can be no question that the world reaped the rewards of a peaceful Europe, a democratic Japan, and that the American people prospered. Conversely, our enemies in the Cold War era that followed World War II lost a great deal, and those under their dominion seized the first opportunity to rid themselves of their oppressors.

Is there a lesson in this history for the United States and Ukraine? Many; but perhaps the most important is that Ukraine can be a critical tool for the United States in the containment of a resurgent, and dangerous Russia. Ukraine rests at the intersection of both U.S. strategic, economic, and moral interests. The moral argument is clear: Ukraine is a sovereign and democratic country invaded by a dictatorial enemy of the United States. The strategic interests are also clear: We should be opposed to the idea of a Europe dominated by Moscow. Ukraine is what stands between the two, and stopping Putin on the cheap — the Ukrainians are fighting this war, we are merely subsidizing their battle — is in our interests. But the economic arguments have been fraught.

It has become clear over the last year plus that certain elements of the GOP are drifting away from supporting Kyiv. Some of those self-labeled conservatives are pro-Moscow; they want Putin to win. Others are merely concerned that at a time when many Americans are under the economic gun, Congress is spending hundreds of billions on a small war, far away. This is a not a crazy complaint. Economically, it might be minuscule when compared to the disaster of snowballing entitlement spending. But that spending is on Americans. In short, their complaints cannot be dismissed.

Luckily, this is where the economic appeal of an allied Ukraine standing firm against Russia can be. And last week, Marc laid out the argument in the Washington Post. He writes:

Ukraine is not only the breadbasket of Europe; it is also a mineral superpower, with some of the largest reserves of 117 of the 120 most widely used minerals in the world. Of the 50 strategic minerals identified by the United States as critical to its economy and national security, many of which are quite rare yet key to certain high-value applications, Ukraine supplies 22.

These critical minerals can belong to the burgeoning Axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea… or they can belong to us. Not “us,” as in we take them; “us” as in the Ukrainians commit not simply never to sell these minerals to the bad guys, but that the $26 trillion value of those minerals — yes, I wrote TRILLION — can guarantee loans from the United States or Europe to continue buying U.S. weapons. There are innumerable good arguments why this should be our bargain going forward. Will they satisfy the Putin-lovers whispering in Donald Trump’s ears? They will not. But as Donald Trump has made clear in recent days, he’s not interest in cutting off Ukraine.

One of the things that surprised many of us about Trump’s first term was his ability to see old problems in new ways. Sometimes that sort of boldness fell flat — North Korea, ahem; at other times, it led to seismic changes like the Abraham Accords. There’s nothing crazy about looking to a nation with trillions in mineral reserves and suggesting that an economic understanding should underpin future relationships. What matters is that whether or not Ukraine is able to forge a peace with Russia, it will be able to guarantee that peace or keep the Russians at bay with the military might necessary to ensure Putin will not be knocking on any other doors any time in the future.

There should be little disagreement from patriotic Americans that seeing Putin contained is very much in our interest. Particularly if the U.S taxpayer isn’t required to foot the bill.

HIGHLIGHTS

MT: We're doing an episode of What the Hell Did I Write This Week? Because I had a big essay in The Washington Post this week talking about Donald Trump's great critique of the Iraq War was we shouldn't have gone in, but if we did go in, we should have gotten the oil. Well, Ukraine has a lot of minerals. It's a mineral superpower, and it's got trillions and trillions of dollars of critical minerals that we need and as well as shale gas and oil and other things; and Vladimir Putin wants those things. I decided to do a little bit of a deep dive into what exactly does Ukraine have? And why would we want to make sure it didn't fall into the hands of Russia and China?

DP: What prompted you to do this? It was interesting. Obviously I know, but I think our listeners would like to know. What made you think about this? Because it seems to me that one of the weaknesses of national security strategy in a lot of instances is that we really only think about the State Department Foreign Ministry perspective. In other words, bad that Russia is invading or bad that the Taliban and al-Qaeda have taken over Afghanistan. But we don't necessarily think about the economic issues. We don't necessarily think about the other factors that might actually make that country important, interesting, and valuable to us. What made you think of it?

MT: Well, first of all, what I've tried to do over the last couple of years is construct a series of arguments on Ukraine that are based entirely on US national interest. We can both make the moral case for helping Ukraine, and we believe it, and I think that case gets made a lot, but there are a lot of national interest case for helping Ukraine. And so I did a whole essay on the America first case for helping Ukraine. I did a series of essays in The Post laying out how the military aid we give to Ukraine is actually not going to Ukraine. What we're doing is we're giving them old weapons from our stockpiles and the money that Congress passes to refill our stockpiles with new fancy modern versions of the same weapons. And so it's energized our industrial base, it's given us a backdoor modernization of the military, and it's created a lot of jobs here in the United States.

And now we're in this new Trump era where Trump is coming in. The MAGA movement is very focused on why are things in our national interest? And so I'm continuing to try and make the case for why helping Ukraine is in our international interest. And these minerals are critical because I hope that Donald Trump succeeds in negotiating an end to the war. I think the Ukrainians are getting tired of the war. Putin is not getting tired of the war except that he's got a lot of problems because it's draining his resources in a way that I don't think is widely appreciated. But he wants Ukraine. He's not sick of fighting. And he'll sacrifice as many hundreds of thousands of Russian troops or North Korean troops or Chechen troops. Or I've heard there are other mercenaries from other countries coming in to fight. He'll just throw their bodies in the meat grinder as long as it takes.

But regardless of whether Trump succeeds or fails in the negotiations, and I hope he succeeds, we're going to have to arm Ukraine because either they're going to have to keep fighting to defend their country because the negotiations fail, or if the negotiations succeed, we're going to have to help them build a deterrent to make sure that Putin doesn't restart the war. And they're going to need that deterrent because the only way we get to extract these minerals for our own benefit is if there's a lasting piece that survives Donald Trump because you need investment. You need people go in and dig mines and put money in.

And also, this is a great way to arm Ukraine because I think we need to move Ukraine from an aid recipient to a normal country that buys weapons from the United States. And with a lot of countries, we use foreign military financing and other things. And you and I and Jack Keane are working on a big... And I won't go into all the details of it here, but we can loan them the money and use these mineral deposits as collateral so that we make sure we get paid back. I think it's important for our policymakers and for people in Washington and up on Capitol Hill to know exactly what they have and what's available and why it's essential to us to make sure that these critical minerals and other things don't fall into the new revanchist Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean orbit but stay in the Western orbit where they can benefit the American people.

DP: Look, the argument makes a lot of sense to me. And from what we understand about Donald Trump's approach to such things in his first term, I suspect it makes a lot of sense to him. I want to ask you one last question though before you read everybody the piece because it's a really, really great and important and well-researched piece. Unfortunately, you won't see the maps on the podcast, but I do encourage you to take a look either on the Substack where we're going to post it or Marc's article directly and see what it says.

Marc, the thing of it is I think that you're right, that if negotiations fail, we'll need to arm Ukraine, if negotiations succeed, we'll need to arm Ukraine. We don't want to be in the business of defending them, but I think there are people around the president who neither wish to arm Ukraine in the event of negotiations failure or in the event of success, I think there are people who wish to abandon Ukraine. I don't know how much Donald Trump listens to them, but I know they're there. What do you think about the weight of that argument, the who cares? Who cares whether Ukraine is part of Russia or Ukraine is an independent country? Explain to me why the American people give a damn about that. Do you realize eggs cost $8?

MT: Well, first of all, the Reagan Institute poll just came out and shows the American people do actually care about Ukraine. I don't have the poll in front of me, but I think 75% consider Ukraine an ally and think we should continue to arm them and help them win and 80% consider Russia an enemy. And as I've gone through in previous articles, I've gone through and showed how actually MAGA Republicans are even more pro Ukraine and pro America flexing its muscle on the international stage than establishment Republicans are. But that's for another podcast.

I think, yes, there are people around Trump who feel this way, but Donald Trump doesn't feel that way. I've had many conversations with him about Ukraine. I'm in communication with him about Ukraine. And I pay attention to the things he says as opposed to the caricature of Donald Trump on Ukraine. He said the other day in his Time magazine interview for person of the year, they said, "Are you going to abandon Ukraine?" And he said, "No, I'm not going to because I want to negotiate peace, and I can't get Russia to the table if I abandon Ukraine." Even as a negotiation point, he understands that we need to keep arming Ukraine in order to force Putin to the table. And I think he understands that the intransigent party is Putin, not Zelenskyy.

And he's also said in the past... I go through and I follow what he actually says. He has said that if Putin doesn't negotiate and come to a deal, he's going to increase weapons to Ukraine. And he said that he thinks what happened to Ukraine is terrible. He's talked about the destruction of the country. He talks about those beautiful onion domes that'll never be rebuilt, all the people who've died. I think he thinks war, what's been done to Ukraine is terrible. And I also think he really, really, really likes Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

I know there's some people on the right who've tried to turn him into a boogeyman of some kind, and they whisper all sorts of lies to Trump about him but Trump credits him with saving him in the first impeachment. When he met with Zelenskyy in New York at Trump Tower, he said he was like a piece of steel when it came to the phone call. And he said, "I did nothing wrong." And when he said that, the whole impeachment died right there. Donald Trump feels that Zelenskyy was in his corner when he needed him when people were trying to weaponize that phone call against him, and Zelenskyy backed him up, and so he's going to back Zelenskyy up. And I think he wants to have a deal that will outlast his presidency, and we should help him do that.

DP: It's a great piece and I hope very persuasive. I have to say that anyone who has spent any time studying either history or working foreign policy understands that you can ignore countries for a certain period of time. We ignored Japan. Eventually they came and got us. We ignored Hitler's Germany for eight years after his rise. Eventually they came and got us. And I think that is the challenge for people who whisper in Donald Trump's ear who say to him, "You can ignore this. Putin only wants Ukraine." Because the answer is not only that Putin does not want to be limited by Ukraine, but that he has much, much bigger ambitions. And Donald Trump is in his second term; he's already going to be a lame duck. And I think that for him, it is really important to secure a legacy that doesn't look like Joe Biden's legacy, which is conflict absolutely everywhere.

MT: I don't think he will. I think he takes this seriously. And look, one of the things that this argument does is it completely disarms the anti-Ukraine rife. Because what is their argument? Their argument is, "Oh, you Ukraine lovers; you just want endless war funded by US taxpayers." And what we're saying is, "No, we want to stop the war and have a just peace. And we want the weapons to be funded by Ukraine, and here's how." And so if you take the endless war and the taxpayer funding off the table, they've got nothing except, "We just want Putin to win."

DP: Right. Well, don't underestimate the power of that argument. But yes, I agree with you. One of the things that has been really notable to me since Donald Trump's election, and I would say even before, is the willingness of certain people to impute views to him. And when I say this, I don't just mean the absolute weirdos in the left wing corporate press, I also mean people who portray themselves as his allies and I would say he thinks of as his allies but, in fact, don't speak for him. This, I think, really will go to that question. Is he really an ally of Vladimir Putin or is he a person who is simply interested in securing our national interests and saving the taxpayer money? God knows after this administration, after COVID, the argument about saving taxpayers' money should be hugely persuasive.

MT: Yes, it should. He's definitely not an ally of Vladimir Putin. And here's what Trump generally does in his general strategy that I've divined watching him over his first term and even watching him during this transition. He engages in a strategy of what I would call escalation dominance where he goes to the top of the escalation ladder and dares you to follow him but also shows you a way off. He tells China, "I'm going to impose 10% tariffs on you," but he invites Xi Jinping to his inauguration. Hammer, but also a hand of friendship. He did this with Kim Jong Un. He's done this with Putin. But if you just look at the actions he took against Russia in his first term, he was the toughest president on Russia since Ronald Reagan. In terms of the actual steps that he took to combat the Russian regime, he was incredibly tough.

There's a lot of lazy narratives about Donald Trump. He's a very complex person and he has flaws, but people want to take... There's a bad, lazy habit that some people have of taking the worst thing he ever said out of context and building an entire narrative around it while ignoring other things that he said that put what he's doing into a different context. And I think that is the case.

And I think people make that mistake on both the left and the right. I think they made that mistake on the left in trying to demonize him and to portray him as something he's not. And I think some Republican isolationists who like the half of what he says but ignore the other half of what he says, which is, "I love Zelenskyy. I think what happened to Ukraine is terrible. It would've never happened if I was president, and we're going to get a just and lasting piece." I think those of us who want to see him succeed, and I count myself as one of them, need to give him the arguments and the data and the weapons to make the case for the right policies, which I think he is inclined to follow.

DP: All right, let's talk a little bit also about this mineral issue because I think that there's a certain complexity here. Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about mineral wealth. They understand about oil, they understand even about coal, they may well understand about uranium, Iran, but they don't necessarily understand about lithium, other rare earths, other critical minerals, manganese and others that you listed because we don't spend a ton of time thinking about that. It's like reading the back of the cereal box. But I think that's the right way to think about this. This is the back of the cereal box. These things are so critical to everything that we produce. And the Chinese have recognized that if they are going to maintain their own mark of dominance, they need to control the export of these minerals. And that's why, as you rightly noted, they just barred the export of these minerals.

But it's not just that; you, Joe Blow, American can't go and invest in those minerals in China either. You can't take those. That's the other thing that is, I think, at issue is there are places that are entirely closed off to the US market and to US investors. But even more importantly, as China becomes a bonafide member of this axis of evil, whatever we call it, I still like axis of evil, with Russia, Iran, and North Korea, they are going to prioritize sharing critical minerals with those bad guys as opposed to us. That puts us in a position where we are being dominated by the Chinese where they get to set the price and we have to run and ask them unless we make sure that we do what a lot of people call friend shoring, which is that instead you buy your stuff from good guys. And you and I have talked about this in an area where I think the American people totally understand, which is that China dominates the pharmaceuticals market, right?

MT: Yep.

DP: Why in heaven's name would we ever put ourselves in the position of relying on the people's Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party for our penicillin, for our masks, for our basic needed antibiotics and medications when, if we are in conflict with them, if we have a problem, even another pandemic, we will be screwed? That is something people understand, and that is the argument here for ensuring that we have access to Ukraine's critical minerals.

MT: I think everybody understands oil and gas because everybody goes and fills their car and their truck with gas produced by the oil that we dig up around the world and here in the United States, but everybody also knows all these minerals that we have in Ukraine you have in your home right now. Everything you use is powered by lithium ion batteries. Lithium is the mineral that goes in that makes the lithium ion battery work along with a lot of the other minerals that I named in this article. You have them in your home just as much as you put gas in your car, so we are completely dependent on these.

There's a whole other podcast to be had and a whole other article I plan to write at some point on the insanity of this whole electrification of our transportation system, because right now China is completely dependent on us and the Western world for oil, but we are completely dependent on them for lithium and all this other stuff and so, the strategic geniuses we are on the left, are saying, "Let's get rid of the natural resources that we have and that they're dependent on us for and replace it with the one that we don't have and that we're dependent on them for because that's really smart." It's just from a national security perspective, whatever you think of climate change, absolute insanity.

And what China is doing is not only does it have massive amounts of these minerals and rare earths in its own country, they're going around the world and buying up all the mines in the third world where these exist. I was in South Africa a couple of years ago. We were on the highway that leads to one of the port cities, and it was just nothing but Chinese trucks carrying minerals to ship them out from South Africa. They're digging up this stuff all over the world. They're trying to corner the market so that we don't have friendly sources to get this from. Why would we not want to have a country that has $26 trillion worth of this stuff as an ally in the Western orbit as opposed to it being in the Russian-Chinese orbit? It makes no sense strategically to do that.

And the reality is that even if we drill, baby, drill as we should, we still need these things because they power our cell phones, they power our computers, they power anything that has chips in it and batteries in it; we need these minerals to power. And also, we need to expand nuclear power and we need uranium. And we get a lot of our uranium from Russia. And do we really want to be dependent on Russia for uranium? We should have friendly sources of uranium. Or would we rather have UK Ukraine's uranium going into Iranian nuclear weapons? That would be a good place for that uranium to go. And believe me, because Iran has been helping Russia in Ukraine, if Russia were to succeed in Ukraine, guess where that uranium would be going. I don't want this stuff in their orbit, I want it in our orbit. And we've already invested in $183 billion helping defend Ukraine; let's get a return on that investment for the American taxpayer.

DP: Right. Well, I think that's important. And folks, if you are interested in understanding what happens to a country that moves forward California style with this kind of electrification, this kind of progressive economic vision, then look at Germany. Germany has mandated that all cars be electric. Germany shuttered its last nuclear power plants some years ago. Now Germans pay a vast amount. Germans are dependent, or were, entirely on Russia, and as a result, have to pursue a much more, let's say, appeasing strategy towards Vladimir Putin. They are really at their beck and call. Germany is dependent upon its economic relationship with China and so won't crack down on the nefarious Chinese activities that are happening in Europe. Think about Huawei, CTE, other bad stuff. Germany is in economic decline. And when I say decline, I mean this is a country that's gone from being the engine of Europe to being the sick man of Europe.

If you want that for us, well then we should definitely continue ahead with the kinds of policies that were dictated by the Biden EPA, by Gavin Newsom's California, because we know what the natural outcome is. And if we want to be a poor country, if we want to be a dependent country, if we want to be a country that asks, "How high?" when the Chinese Communist Party says, "Jump," then we will do these things. Otherwise, we need to secure our own supply lines, as Marc said. The Chinese are all over the world investing in things that they need. And believe me, they are not asking for the kinds of conditions that we do. They are not anti-corruption. They are not pro-human rights. They are not pro-West. All they want is, "You give me what I need and I'll be your friend." That's the kind of enemy we're up against, so we need to be pretty serious.

MT: Biden restricted development on over 1 million acres of land that includes the only US source of high-grade uranium ore. They literally, as an environmental measure, they took that land out of development, and so we can't dig for uranium here at home. One of the problems we have with a lot of these rare earths and a lot of these minerals is mineral mining is really dirty. It's ugly. You're digging into the land or you're violating the land. You're making deep mines that there's outflow and pollution from those things.

And one of the problems is that Americans really don't want that here. They don't want uranium ore being dug up near their homes and stuff like that. But guess what. This is an argument that many on the left would call neocolonialist, but a lot of countries like Ukraine don't have the same environmental restrictions that we do, and so they're able to do this. It's all the NIMBY attitude here in America, "Not in my backyard." A lot of countries that are poorer than us are more than willing to do this digging and to develop these resources and give them to us. And so if you don't want uranium mines in your backyard and you don't want lithium being dug up near your home and you don't want ugly scarring from sea to shining sea, our fruited plains and all the rest of that, you got to get it from somewhere, and Ukraine is one of the places that's willing to dig up their country and give it to us; so are a lot of countries in Africa, so are a lot of poorer nations.

And China understands this, and so not only are they willing to scar their own, which is massive and they don't care hoot about their own people and their people have no say in it, but they're willing to go up and dig and buy up all these mines all around the world and scar those countries as well. And so we should be trying to keep the countries that have these resources that we need in our orbit or else we're going to have to scar up our own country a lot more and dig it up and repeal a lot of environmental regulations to make it happen.