With $50bn and security deals, G7 tries to arm Ukraine against Western voters
(Originally published June 14 in “What in the World“) The Group of Seven leading democracies formalized a U.S. plan to let Ukraine use Russia’s own assets to buy Western arms to repel Russia’s invasion.
Rather than simply turn over seized Russian funds to Kyiv, however, the plan hands Ukraine $50 billion in Western cash in the form of a loan, which it must repay using interest on $260 billion in Russian funds sitting frozen in Western banks. Those assets, the G7 agreed, will remain frozen until Moscow agrees to reparations to Ukraine for its invasion. That seems to skirt the sticky issue of expropriation while providing Ukraine with funds that aren’t a handout from Western nations dependent on voters who seem to be leaning rightward toward leaders who may pull the plug on its military aid.
U.S. President Joe Biden also signed a 10-year security agreement with Ukraine that technically spans the potential re-election of former President Donald Trump, who while supporting Ukraine’s independence has questioned the flow of aid to Kyiv and instead supported just what the G7 has provided instead—a loan. “You cannot wait us out. You cannot divide us,” Biden said after signing the agreement.
But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who traveled to Italy to join the G7 leaders, remains unconvinced. His new agreement with the U.S. merely commits the White House to working with Congress to find future funds for Ukraine’s defense and coordinate with Kyiv to defend itself against Russia. But either side can cancel the agreement with six months notice, meaning Trump if re-elected could scotch it by as early as next July.
Zelensky and some European allies are still pushing for Ukraine’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Biden’s 10-year deal reaffirms the goal of Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership, but the U.S. and others still oppose admitting Ukraine into the alliance while it remains at war, as doing so would commit all of NATO’s 32 member states to defending Ukraine’s sovereignty in the event of attack.
Many believe the war in Ukraine is only part of a larger confrontation with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea against the U.S.-led world order and that the West must accelerate its own arms buildup to deter further aggression. To that end, Japan—which has been building its ties with the U.S. to deter China’s growing assertiveness in the Pacific—signed its own 10-year security agreement with Ukraine, along with a pledge of $4.5 billion in aid.
Russia, meanwhile, has stepped up its campaign in Ukraine by using new long-range Kh-101 cruise missiles armed with cluster munitions to attack an airfield west of Kyiv.
The U.S. has responded to the arrival of Russian naval vessels in Cuba by sending a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine to the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay. The USS Helena arrived in Cuba Thursday, only a day after a Russian naval group that includes a nuclear submarine pulled into Havana ahead of planned exercises in the Caribbean.
The dangers of seeing the world in terms of a grand, black-and-white conflict are usually compared to the Cold War, with its maps of the world divided between Communist and Free, while rising tensions in the Pacific between a rising China and the U.S. commonly draw parallels with Imperial Japan’s own rise from 1895-1941.
Yale history professor Odd Arne Westad, in an intriguing piece in Foreign Affairs, finds an alternative parallel for the escalating rivalry between China and the United States: not between Imperial Japan and pre-war U.S. in the 1930s, but rather between Germany and Britain before World War I. “Just as Germany began fearing that it would be hemmed in both economically and strategically in the 1890s and the early 1900s—exactly when Germany’s economy was growing at its fastest clip—China,” Westad writes,” began fearing it would be contained by the United States just as its own economy was soaring.”
Germany, like modern-day China, saw its rise as destiny in the same way the U.S. did earlier in the 19th century (and for some to this day, e.g. “Maga”). And it saw Britain’s military and trade response as a dangerous attempt to contain it to protect British hegemony. “Some of [Beijing’s] complaints about American behavior are strikingly similar to those that Germany lodged against Britain in the early twentieth century,” writes Westad. And while the U.S. claims to remain open to cooperation, it is blinkered by suspicion. “The problem now is—as it was in the years before 1914—that any opening for cooperation, even on key issues, gets lost in mutual recriminations, petty irritations, and deepening strategic mistrust.”
Eventually, both sides believed it was in their interest to fight a war sooner than later or risk becoming weaker. Germany provided the pretext by invading Belgium, drawing Britain into war. Westad says Taiwan is the obvious trigger for a war between the U.S. and China.
“If the United States wants to prevent a war, it has to convince Chinese leaders that it is not hell-bent on preventing China’s future economic development,” says Westad. China’s leaders, meanwhile, are repeating Germany’s error of failing to demonstrate how “their country’s rise would or would not remake the world.” Specifically, China needs “to regulate its exports in such a way that they do not make it impossible for other countries’ domestic industries to compete in important areas…”
Likewise, both sides need to return to the rapprochement on Taiwan that has defined their position there since the Shanghai Communique of 1972, when both agreed that Taiwan was part of China, and that reunification would someday be achieved peacefully. “A restatement of these principles today would help prevent a conflict: Washington could say that it will under no circumstances support Taiwan’s independence, and Beijing could declare that it will not use force unless Taiwan formally takes steps toward becoming independent.”
On the subject of intransigence, neither Hamas nor Israel is willing to drop their most extreme demands in order to accept a U.S.-brokered, U.N.-approved ceasefire deal. Israel has instead launched a heavy bombardment of Gaza as well as airstrikes against Iran-backed Hezbollah militias in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah responded to the airstrikes by launching a second day of rocket and drone attacks against military targets in northern Israel.
U.S. forces in the Red Sea also launched airstrikes against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen in response to a renewed wave of Houthi attacks on commercial vessels. After crippling a Greek-owned bulk carrier heading for Aqaba, the Houthis set fire to a Ukrainian-owned bulk carrier shipping lumber to Italy.