That’s how Donald Trump initially approached Gaza, imagining the Palestinian enclave as a new Riviera.
In the case of Ukraine, the former Soviet state’s impressive natural resources are prioritised over protecting the civilian population from extermination.
The interesting aspect of a peace deal based on a business opportunity is how it ties peace to profits. If it doesn’t produce revenue, genocide becomes justifiable. Ask the Palestinians.
If you think the Ukrainians are more important because they’re Europeans, they’re not. For Trump and Putin, both populations are equally disposable.
The White House has treated the Ukraine war less as a geopolitical rupture than as a distressed asset with delinquent tenants and—importantly—favourable refinancing opportunities.
The ironic premise of the Trump Administration’s diplomacy with Moscow is straightforward: de-escalate, in a way that looks like disruption, feels like negotiation, and closes like a deal.
Unfortunately, implementing this approach has tilted negotiations toward Vladimir Putin while incorporating vaguely gestured “market incentives” for corporate stakeholders.
What the White House tried to sell as pragmatism has looked more like acquiescence lubricated by opportunity.
The Trump Administration has been selling concessions as realism. It has treated Ukraine’s territory as negotiable in ways Europe’s borders never have been.
It has regarded the Kremlin’s demands—ceding occupied territories, shelving the prospect of joining NATO accession, and recognising Russian control over Ukraine’s security architecture—not as a revision of the post-Soviet settlement, but as a reasonable starting point for further discussion.
In a parallel conversation, US officials have nodded approvingly at the idea that the frozen conflict might create “predictable investment weather”, a meteorological metaphor familiar to private equity if not international law.
The logic is circular but internally coherent: Russia escalated first; therefore, Russia will need inducements to stop escalating.
Ukraine, which actually holds the title to the land under discussion, must accept that perfect sovereignty is the enemy of good EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortisation).
The structural asymmetry inherent in the Trump Administration’s peacebroker efforts has left Ukraine in the uncomfortable position of having to thank Russia for not seizing more of its territory.
It’s not that Washington is willing to concede ground. To concede someone else’s ground, to be honest.
It’s that these concessions have been bundled, like a BOGO (Buy One, Get One) offer, with softly insinuated advantages for commercial interests aligned with the Trump Administration.
These advantages are “unspecified” in the technical sense of never appearing in official communiqués, yet “specified” in the colloquial sense of being impossible to miss.
American energy firms are being told that peace could make Black Sea exploration “less noisy”.
At the same time, prospective mineral investors are being briefed that a settlement might provide “legal assurances for long-term contracts” without clarifying which legal regimes would provide them.
American officials are flirting with language about “infrastructure partnerships” that might emerge in reconstruction zones heavily damaged by Russia, suggesting that the path to peace might include the future resale of conflict rubble.
To a European audience, this sounds like burning down a building, then leasing the parking lot.
There’s no avoiding such conclusions. Think the MBAs who preach the gospel of creative destruction at TED Talks. This is foreign policy conducted by Mashable readers.
If Washington’s approach is transactional, Europe’s predicament is structural.
The war reshaped the strategic landscape for the European Union, which suddenly confronted the dual task of deterring Russian imperialism and managing a growing, pro-Putin far-right insurgency.
Just ask French opposition leader Marine Le Pen, her German twin Alice Weidel, and the governing parties in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. All Trump acolytes equally crushed out on the Kremlin.
The Trump Administration’s negotiating posture created cascading challenges for the EU’s internal coherence.
Diplomatic concessions to Moscow signal a decline in American custodianship of the European security order. They also raise an ideological contradiction sharper than a Russia sanctions list.
Washington’s language of disruption overlaps with far-right European scepticism of technocracy and ethno-nationalism.
The racist politics animating the European far right were already awkward with complex institutions; they are downright clumsy in the face of empire.
Far-right parties championing cultural homogeneity, borders, and sovereignty over supranational governance find themselves embracing a Russian war dedicated to erasing national autonomy.
Yet it also exposes the ideological poverty of European political movements that pretend sovereignty is a boutique preference.
Far-right European parties are wedded to nationalism as a cure for EU technocracy. But the war in Ukraine reveals nationalism’s deeper flaw. Fragmenting the polity that secures borders undermines them.
Russian imperialism—asserted in tanks, missiles, cyber operations, and threats to energy choke points—poses geopolitical dangers to the European Union.
Far-right parties demand ideological uniformity, whose policy proposals would return Europe to a pre-EU fragmentation incompatible with deterrence against a militarised imperial Moscow.
For the far right, empire is fine in the abstract if it opposes Brussels. Empire, in the literal, kinetic sense, rolling toward the EU’s outer edges, disrupts the narrative synergy on which they depend.
One can champion “Europe for Europeans” or admire Russian imperial revanchism— but doing both creates the ideological coherence of a döner sundae.
Far-right parties often try to designate the EU as a tyrannical centre, strangling cultural identity. Yet the real authoritarian regime is baroque, militarised, nuclear-briefed, and located in the Kremlin.
The EU may be technocratic, regulatory-zealous, and dedicated to document formatting. But it is not carpet bombing apartment buildings in Kharkiv, even though it completely fails in Palestine.
The Ukraine war is a crisis of borders, sovereignty, institutions, and the material basis of security.
The diplomatic efforts of the Trump Administration reveal peace as a negotiating constraint curve, not an institutional guarantee.
The American-led ‘peace’ negotiations leave open the hint of private advantage without a list of terms, creating the impression that the settlement is a deal memo first and a peace doctrine second.
If peace is brokered as a concession with incentive clauses for business interests, it produces a bilateral deal environment.
If peace is brokered as deterrence credibility anchored by supranational institutions, it will produce something approximating order.
The only rational choice is the latter. Pretending that peace is anything other than what it is will fail.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
