Economic conditions for Ukraine, the bill has arrived

The horrid businessman who inhabits Donald Trump's mind must be recognized for an involuntary clarification: he is clearing the field of the geopolitical trivializations that have dominated the debate on the war. And he is clarifying that peace is decided on the capitalist interests at stake and not only by drawing the border line of the new Russified Ukraine.

We said it in times not suspect: the main negotiating table will be the one that will set the economic conditions for peace. It seems we have arrived. And unfortunately, as expected, it is not the table we hoped to see. The case of the hoarding of rare earths from Ukraine is indicative. As the manifesto reported yesterday, Zelensky shouted until the end to reiterate that he would not sign any promissory note to the allies to obtain weapons. True or false, by now he is vox clamantis in deserto.

The grotesque skit at the White House between Macron and Trump proves it. The American claims that the rare earths are due to him because the United States' aid to Ukraine, unlike the European one, was not covered by guarantees. The Frenchman interrupts him by stating that the EU wants to recover not from Ukraine but only from the Russian funds frozen in European bank accounts. A pretentious hypothesis, a bit like if France, the victor of the First World War, had been asked to pay the debts of defeated Germany.

THE TRUTH of the deal is that together they will milk Ukraine for decades to come in order to recoup their military spending. In any case, the usurpation of the defeated Ukraine is a dramatically secondary issue. Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, has repeated it once again: to normalize relations between Washington and Moscow there is still a lot of work to be done, especially in terms of trade and financial cooperation agreements.

The Kremlin's goal is the same as always: to do away with the hypocritical protectionism of the so-called "sanctions" and to once again open American and Western markets to business with Russia.

A PROPOSAL , as is known, that Moscow is carrying forward in complete harmony with Beijing. It is no coincidence that for weeks the Chinese government has insisted on interpreting the glimmer of peace in Ukraine as an opportunity to open a multilateral economic negotiation. The stakes on the table: reopening America and the West to the free exchange of goods and capital with the Eastern “enemies”.

Trump is terrified of such a prospect. His administration would even be willing to send Ukraine, the Baltics and the entire European border of NATO to hell. The essential thing is that the American protectionist wall remains standing. This is, in fact, the only condition for keeping at bay an otherwise unmanageable US debt to foreign countries, both public and private.

THIS IS WHY the US presidency is trying to keep the Chinese as far away as possible from the peace agreements. The American hope is to convince Putin to start a bilateral negotiation based on the opening only to Russian capital. It is the attempt to resurrect the old Nixonian divide and conquer to separate the Russian destinies from those of the Chinese giant. The problem is that the economic entanglement between Russia and China is now difficult to disentangle.

In recent years, Chinese exports to the Russian economy have more than doubled, from $50 billion in 2018 to over $100 billion today. "China and Russia cannot be separated": Xi's warning to the world a few days ago is based on fairly solid economic grounds. If Russia remains firmly tied to China, the White House will have to look for other ways. One of these is for the United States to decide to unload the protectionist weapon entirely on the shoulders of the old EU allies.

TRUMP COULD that is, threaten us: «Dear Europeans, either you pay our debts or from now on we will only do business with enemies». It is Biden's “friend shoring” that under Trump is reversed and becomes “unfriend shoring”. The umpteenth, astonishing paradox of a very precarious capitalist peace.