Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
In December 1940, then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt explained the thinking behind his plan to lend and lease wartime supplies and equipment to a beleaguered Britain. It was like offering a neighbor the use of a garden hose to extinguish a house fire. You wouldn’t say to your neighbor “my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it,” he said.
All you would ask is your hose be returned once the flames had been doused.
Not, of course, if you’re U.S. President Donald Trump, who would undoubtedly seize the moment of his neighbor’s greatest peril as a golden business opportunity, withholding the hose until he received many times more than what he paid for it — with cash up front.
And if you think that’s unfair — or an example of Trump derangement syndrome — just take a closer look at the minerals deal the U.S. fleecer-in-chief is trying to foist on Ukraine in its moment of existential danger.
The deal-of-the-century would see the U.S. paid back considerably more than the $120 billion that the Kiel Institute, a German-based think tank, calculates the Americans have actually spent on aid to Kyiv between January 2022 and December 2024.
According to the deal’s latest iteration, the U.S. would receive half the revenue generated by Ukraine’s oil, gas and hydrocarbons, as well as almost all from its metals, critical minerals and “other extractable materials.” The U.S. would also draw profits from any infrastructure linked to natural resources — including roads, rail, pipelines, ports, terminals and refineries. The list of infrastructure goodies goes on at length.
Not satiated with that, the U.S. would receive all natural resources royalties and profits until Ukraine paid off at least $100 billion of war debt to the U.S., with 4 percent interest added as the debt was being paid down. After that, Ukraine would eventually go on to receive half the profits and royalties generated by its own natural resources, but goodness knows when that would be — the debt as itemized in the deal, fortunately less than the $350 billion erroneously claimed by Trump, is equivalent to 56 percent of the country’s GDP, and that’s before considering interest.
Oh, and the deal lasts forever.
So, it’s less Lend-Lease and more like the unequal treaties imperial Western powers forced on China in the 19th century.
The first of those, the Treaty of Nanking, ended the First Opium War between Britain and the Qing dynasty in 1842. It required China to pay a massive indemnity, cede the island of Hong Kong to the British as a crown colony, and open up to foreign trade on British terms, with London deciding tariff rates.
The treaty then set the pattern for a series of one-sided agreements that Western powers demanded China sign, resulting in expropriations, widespread plundering and sovereignty erosion — terms that go some way in explaining Beijing’s current geopolitical resentments and determination to upend the Western order.
Of course, the major difference between those unequal treaties and Trump’s minerals deal is that they were imposed on an adversary following military victories — not on an ostensible ally.
And while Ukrainians bewail the idea of paying reparations to the U.S., it’s important to remember that what Trump is demanding isn’t really “war reparations” — payments to make amends for a wrong done by a defeated aggressor. Rather, the U.S. president is acting as a war profiteer, a Halliburton and Blackwater all rolled into one, amorally exploiting the moment to gouge.
FDR’s point with Lend-Lease was that there’s self-interest in lending your hose to your neighbor — the fire might spread to your house too, so best to douse it before it does, if possible. And the eventual legislation that the U.S. Congress approved gave him broad powers to “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend or otherwise dispose of” items to other countries in the interest of U.S. national security.
At its peak, the Lend-Lease programs assisted 38 countries with supplies and equipment to the tune of around $50 billion — the equivalent of nearly $700 billion today when accounting for inflation. Britain received the lion’s share, and eventually only about $8 billion was ever actually repaid, with most of that coming from the U.K. and France. Moreover, while intact equipment was meant to be returned under the deal’s terms, in reality there was little of that. Instead, what remained was sold to the allies at discount prices. No price gouging there.
In addition to help defeating Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan, the U.S. received some other tangible benefits from these deals too. There was some reverse Lend-Lease and reciprocal contributions, including Mosquito photo-reconnaissance aircraft and aviation spark plugs for B-17 Flying Fortresses from the U.K., petroleum products from India, food for GIs in the South Pacific from Australia and New Zealand, and Joseph Stalin supplied the U.S. with chrome, manganese ore, platinum, gold and wood.
It was, however, all diminutive in scale compared to what allies got from the U.S. But that was never the point.
And years later, in 2022, former President Joe Biden cited Roosevelt’s program as he signed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act to supply military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russia.
Trump, though, doesn’t see the self-interest in helping allies, instead repeating the U.S. is safe thanks to “a big, beautiful ocean.” But Roosevelt didn’t believe that. In a December 1940 radio broadcast, where he introduced the idea of America becoming “the great arsenal of democracy,” he warned the country couldn’t stand aloof: “Some of us like to believe that even if Britain falls, we are still safe, because of the broad expanse of the Atlantic and of the Pacific.” Modern technology, he cautioned, had already effectively reduced the distances across those oceans.
Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease agreements provided for repayment not in terms of money or returned equipment, but rather required “joint action directed towards the creation of a liberalized international economic order in the postwar world.”
That, of course, isn’t something that would work for Trump — he wants to smash the order FDR laid the groundwork for.
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