Ukraine:
Trump’s Unvarnished Imperialism

Feb 17, 2025

This article is translated from the February 14, issue #2950 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

At the end of World War I, French author Anatole France wrote: “You think you are dying for your country. You die for the industrialists.” Ukrainians have just had their own brutal confirmation of it.

On February 10, Trump declared on Fox News that he is making continued American aid to Ukraine conditional on Ukraine giving him 500 billion dollars worth of rare earth minerals.

The minerals in question are 17 metals essential to industrial sectors that represent a significant part of the world economy, namely mobile phones, digital screens, electric cars, offshore wind turbines, medical robots and devices, and weapons. Despite being called rare, these elements are found in abundance on land and undersea. But only a handful of countries mine these strategic metals, such as China with 60% of the market, because extracting and especially processing them takes an enormous investment.

Though the U.S. occupies second place in this field, it is far behind China. In October, U.S. leaders saw a godsend for their mineral-hungry industries in the announcement of an appetizing “peace plan” concocted by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. He proposed to his “partners” in the war with Russia a “special agreement” providing for “joint exploitation of strategic resources” including uranium, titanium, lithium, graphite “and other high-value resources.”

This proposal attracts his American “partner” so much that the U.S. demands that American interests get exclusive rights to exploit these resources. Too bad for the European “partners” which will only get the dregs American corporations don’t want!

In the event that Zelensky failed to understand that he doesn’t have much choice in the matter, Trump dotted the i’s for him. In his interview with Fox News, he said that Ukrainians “may be Russian some day, or they may not be Russian some day.” In short, their future will depend only on Washington’s goodwill.

Trump added that some of these mineral resources are in the zone occupied by the Russian army. This was yet another way of pressuring his Ukrainian “ally.” Given the constant advance of Russian troops, Kyiv may soon have few rare earth minerals left to trade. In that scenario, the White House could negotiate the future exploitation of these strategic metals with the Kremlin instead. Trump also mentioned that he had recently spoken with Putin and that they had already spoken before.