After World War I, Germany, which had invaded Belgium, had to fork over billions to cover the damages the war had caused.
The end of World War II saw Japan, after invading the Philippines, forced to pay reparations.
But as President Trump tries to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has flipped traditional U.S. foreign policy upside down in demanding that the invaded, not the invader, pay up.
On Friday, Mr. Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine are set to sign a deal enabling the United States to share in the country’s mineral wealth, a move Mr. Trump has portrayed as payback for the aid American taxpayers have supplied the war-torn nation. Mr. Trump insisted that the United States would not be providing security guarantees to Ukraine in return.
The deal may prove beneficial in some regards to Ukraine, because becoming more economically intertwined with the United States could provide its own signal of protection. But it underscores Mr. Trump’s impulse to squeeze even America’s traditional allies as he applies his transactional approach to foreign policy.
“By definition, allies and partners tend to be dependent on us for part or most of their security, and they tend to be economically involved with us,” said Richard N. Haass, the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser for former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. “And what the Trump administration has done is turn that into a liability.”
The United States has traditionally aided its allies under the premise that doing so helped create a more orderly world. Mr. Haass pointed to America’s involvement in producing arms for the allied countries in World War II, the Marshall Plan and the defeat of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
“By setting up a world where we demonstrated that aggression didn’t pay, there would be less aggression,” he said.
But Mr. Trump has indicated he has little use for traditional U.S. alliances, and tends to evaluate relationships based on whether other countries are contributing economically to the United States.
Mr. Trump began his second term with economic hardball toward America’s neighbors to the north and south, threatening to impose new tariffs. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico would go into effect on Tuesday “as scheduled,” and that China would face an additional 10 percent tariff.
“We’ve been treated very unfairly by many, many countries, including our friends — friend and foe,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference on Thursday.
He has mocked Canada as the 51st state and called its prime minister a “governor.” Mr. Trump has also repeatedly expressed interest in annexing Greenland, seizing the Panama Canal and fundamentally remaking the U.S. relationship with Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
But it is Mr. Trump’s upending of America’s relationship with Russia and Ukraine that has prompted the most concern in recent weeks. After years of a U.S. strategy to isolate Moscow, Mr. Trump had a phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin and began talks with Russia about ending the war — initially without Ukraine’s participation.
Now Mr. Trump is close to signing a deal to share in the profits from Ukraine’s natural resources. A draft of the agreement, obtained by The New York Times, contained only vague references to protecting Ukraine. It says the United States “supports Ukraine’s effort to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace.”
“It’s Mafia stuff,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “Zelensky, who is known for his courage, should give Donald Trump the big middle finger and remind him that the one time that NATO Article 5 was exercised, it was on behalf of the United States of America, and neither Britain nor France, nor Germany, nor Belgium, said, ‘Yeah, we’ll help you after 9/11 so long as you give us some of that oil you’ve got.’”
Mr. Trump said on Thursday that, under the deal, the United States would be “digging and taking the rare earth, which we need in our country very badly.” But he expressed doubts that Ukraine actually had the precious minerals America wanted.
“You dig and maybe things aren’t there like you think they’re there, but we’ll be spending a lot of time there,” he said. “It’ll be great for Ukraine. It’s like a huge economic development project. So it’ll be good for both countries.”
Republicans on Capitol Hill, even some who have spoken out against Russian aggression, have argued in favor of Mr. Trump’s moves, portraying the president as negotiating hard to get the best deal for America. The minerals agreement has gone through several iterations and its latest version, which was reviewed by The Times, contained more favorable terms to Ukraine than previous drafts.
“He is a great deal-maker, as everyone will have to acknowledge whether they like it or not,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at his weekly news conference.
Meghan L. O’Sullivan, the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, said the long-term costs of a transactional foreign policy were not immediately noticeable.
She was a special assistant to President George W. Bush and the deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan. During that time, she noted, the United States rejected any suggestion that it should take control of those countries’ resources and withdrew from Iraq’s largest oil fields.
Transactional deals might feel like short-term wins for America, she said, but if the United States withdraws from its traditional role deterring aggression, it will “translate into a more dire economic situation, and globally, a less peaceful, less secure world, and this won’t be good for American prosperity.”
