Beware of Americans offering to make you safe

Does the world need a global policeman, or to return to the UN?

President Trump wants to hoover up Ukraine’s mineral wealth, raise defence spending in Europe while removing all security, and walk into Greenland. Perhaps the world needs a different global policeman.

The terms of the on again, off again minerals deal between the US and Ukraine seem to get more stringent in America’s favour every time agreement isn’t reached. President Trump not only wants first-choice access to practically all of Ukraine’s mineral resources, but to charge interest on outstanding Ukrainian war debts as well.

His claim that supporting the war in Ukraine has cost America $350 billion in US is largely spurious. While America has undoubtedly pumped tens of billions of dollars to prop up the war, much of that funding has remained in the United States, restocking US military inventories and paying defence industry giants like RTX and Northropp Grumann. The FT reported that the big defence companies were to record double the cash flow in 2024 compared to pre-war 2021; the big five American firms have raked in $26bn, or around half of the total windfall.

I have regularly applauded President Trump’s efforts to end the devastating war in Ukraine. But his line on Ukrainian repayment rests on another spurious assumption that Ukraine started the war.

US governments of both stripes – including to a lesser extent while Trump was in office during his first term – actively encouraged, indeed, bankrolled, an antagonistic posture by the Ukrainian state towards Russia. Britain supported America in this, dragging the EU pack along.

That Poroshenko first, then Zelensky were misled into believing the US and wider western alliance would back them all the way to full NATO membership, facing down the predictable Russian military response in the process, proved them both to be naïve and foolish.

Yes, powerful ultranationalists in Ukraine were a thorn in the side of both Presidents, particularly on the issue of devolution in the Donbas. But it would be easy to overstate their nationwide influence, outside of western Ukraine; the Svoboda party captured just over 10% of the national vote in 2012 at its peak. The coup and ouster of Yanukovych, at the very least sanctioned by the US and nodded through by Europe, gave the far right more power than it would otherwise have had.

Independent observers in the west could see at the time that a war with Russia was one that Ukraine could not win, and that NATO would never fight. That central truth never changed throughout the tragic decade that followed.

Trump arguing about Ukraine paying America back is therefore dishonest. It is also a sideshow. When you take a step back, US funding of the war in Ukraine is loose change when set against its frankly gigantic yearly federal budget deficit, which came in at $1.8 trillion in 2024. That would buy the whole of Ukraine nine times over, in terms of yearly output.

$50bn each year appears a more realistic total of what America has actually invested in Ukraine since war started. This is around what the US pays for its Environment Protection Agency. A hefty sum, but hardly earth trembling.

Total US fiscal spending would make America the third largest country in the world by economic output. If you’re not scared by that, you should be.

The decision of the Biden Administration to pour billions into a needless war in Ukraine was a policy choice by the most powerful country on earth, to a weak and politically fragile post-Soviet state that was powerless to say no. Zelensky was a fool to believe the promises made to him by the Biden Administration and the likes of Boris Johnson.

In fiscal terms, the money America has wasted on its war in Ukraine could be written off as a bad bet.

The question is, who’d ever trust the United States with their defence if Ukraine allows its natural resources to be pillaged to pay for a war it allowed itself to be pushed into by America?

Likewise, European defence. Trump has been hectoring European states to raise defence spending, first to 2%, then 3% and on some occasions, 5%. The economic cost of doing so will undoubtedly bring widespread political turmoil and a shift to the far left and right of politics.

With the German government radically changing its law to allow for deficit spending on defence, European nations are gearing up for an historical rearmament to face up to a resurgent Russia. I am not theologically opposed to increases in European defence spending, although I wish it spent a fraction of those resources on diplomacy.

However, I worry that this shift in priorities has been forced on us by US-led efforts to damage relations with Russia so badly, that we are building barricades against a military threat that didn’t exist prior to 2014, when Russian defence spending was around forty percent of today. And there is something rather cynical about America saying that it won’t protect us, but that we should nevertheless pay them more for our defence.

That America spends so much on defence is in itself no guarantee of security. As we are seeing in Greenland, it’s a recipe for old fashioned schoolyard blackmail and intimidation. Far away from anywhere and with no natural geographical enemies, Greenland doesn’t need American defence but is effectively being asked to pay for it by giving up its sovereignty and its immense natural wealth.

The financial cost to the US of taking over Greenland would be miniscule. The US could vastly outmatch the Danish block grant allowing for unprecedented investment in that territory. Because Trump wants Greenland.

What does this mean for other theatres, such as in Taiwan, where China may be encouraged to press its more natural claim to an island accepted by most major countries to be part of one China? If I was a Taiwanese political leader right now, I’d be anxious about further US military support, like the $8 billion package agreed in 2024.

It’s not just that this figure is a drop in the ocean against China’s vast military resources. I doubt very much that America will ever send its troops to fight over Taiwan, much as it has avoided any impression that it would do so for Ukraine. Good intentions and moral outrage will mean nothing should China feel provoked into launching a naval blockade of what it considers to be its sovereign territory. And the US would be harder placed to instigate a global economic, social and cultural blockade of China, in the manner that it succeeded in doing with Russia. I’m afraid that the escalation ramp for Taiwan and its denouement, are all too predictable, from a realist perspective.

Right now, it seems to me, that America, with all its well-meaning missionary intent, is making the world less safe through its miss-placed and normally ill thought through interventions, generating instability and fostering venality, wherever it goes. Perhaps the world needs a new global policeman. Or simply to return to the United Nations as the global meeting point to arbitrate disputes between states.