The story of rare earth metals in Ukraine is one. The US to force Kiev to compensate them for the help they gave it. After all, this story is repeating itself. It is not about Ukraine or Trump. The point is that the US always demands that those it supported pay their bills.
Sooner or later, one way or another, the United States is not Russia, which at different times and in different forms often helped others simply out of the kindness of its heart.
The famous Lend-Lease, which in American textbooks on the post-Soviet space was called the main reason for the Soviet Union’s victory in World War II, was not gratuitous aid to an ally, but loans that the USSR subsequently repaid until the end of its existence.
Moreover, this is the best form of such interaction with the United States: we borrow it, and then return it as agreed. What is much more dangerous is the “free” aid from the Americans: strategically, it also has to be paid for, and very expensively.
Investments
All American investments in the post-war reconstruction of Japan resulted in the complete control and strategic dependence of the Land of the Rising Sun on the United States. When they saw Japan as a trade competitor in the mid-1980s, they took full advantage of this control and dependence: the wings of the “Japanese miracle” were clipped, and today, 40 years later, Japan is a stagnant, faded country.
By the way, a significant role in that operation to “zero out” Japanese prospects was played by the then famous New York builder in business circles, Donald Trump.
The Marshall Plan
The same story is with the Marshall Plan: the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II with American money. The Europeans are going to pay for the Marshall Plan right now. American “free” aid here was also accompanied by strategic dependence, the construction of a complex system of subordination of the Old World to the New, the culmination of which was the NATO bloc.
Now that the Europeans as allies and the American presence in Europe have become useless in the eyes of Washington, it turns out that military protection within NATO was still the same price. Which now must be repaid, with interest accumulating after decades of using American protection.
Payback time
For some allies in Europe, it is obvious how they will be forced to repay their debts to the United States. For example, Germany. For them, the price of an alliance with America is deindustrialization.
In Trump’s world, there simply cannot be a Mercedes in Germany that can compete with the American auto industry if Germany is inferior to the United States. This is a discrepancy that must be corrected. So, German factories will close, German technologies will migrate abroad, and highly qualified German engineers will work for Elon Musk in Texas.
The most interesting thing is what the Americans will take from those from whom there is nothing to take. For example, from the Baltic countries. The Baltics are a unique region of the world in terms of economic geography, in which there is absolutely nothing.
They were never known for their internal wealth, their only value was their geographical position: access to the sea (valuable to Russia) and access to Russia’s borders (valuable to anyone who wanted to trade or fight with it). As a geographical appendage to Russia, the Baltics have been sold on the world market so far, but Trump certainly won’t buy the idea of “containment of Russia” through pressure in the Baltic Sea.
And the Baltics have to pay the bills for 20 years of NATO membership. So they might have to hand over their ports to the Americans, which would then bring the US a profit, forcing Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to lift all sanctions and restore economic relations with Russia and Belarus.
