Traders almost always come first.
British monarchs never set out to conquer North America with their armies, but by the mid-1700s, a century and a half of trade and settlement had made the continent increasingly valuable to the Crown. Troops were sent to secure British treasure, and then taxes were imposed on the American colonies to pay for the costs of the troops. As every American schoolchild knows, the whole exercise did not end well for the British.
British traders preceded soldiers in India, too, as the British East India Company established increasingly important commercial interests that came to require military support. So, too, did the French presence in North Africa, the Dutch presence in Indonesia, and so on. Time after time, modest commercial interests have grown into major ones, and great powers have deployed their militaries to protect them.
President Donald Trump’s instinct to seek mineral rights in exchange for U.S. aid to Ukraine is an understandable one. Ordinary Americans’ willingness to finance overseas wars has dwindled, especially after decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost so much and seemed to yield so little. The appeal of seeing such exercises as investments with potential returns to the U.S. taxpayer is clear.
But U.S. investments like the one contemplated in Ukraine will undermine President Trump’s overarching theory that the United States has become too willing to wage war in far-flung locales. In fact, such investments will force the U.S. military to fight more and not less, and to do so alone more often. The U.S. military should indeed act with restraint, but scattering investments around the globe will make restraint harder to maintain, and it will make adversaries more likely to challenge the United States.
Americans have a long history of looking askance at colonial business models, in part because of their history of being the victims of one. Negotiating with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was determined to ensure that the war’s end also heralded the end of the British Empire. Roosevelt’s concern was that empires create their own imperatives and are incompatible with peace and stability.
Seen broadly, the challenge of building national assets in foreign states is that others challenge them. Host nations can decide to nationalize the assets, or hostile states can threaten them.
The approach the United States has taken for most of a century is to build up a set of expectations to govern states’ behavior. The expectations go far beyond laws, or a “rules-based international order,” as some in the United States have come to term it. Few expected the laws or rules to be self-executing.
Instead, they represented a starting point for presumptive joint action. Even shallow action, if it started off broad enough, could begin to have an impact. Smaller groups of countries could act more directly. The hope was that the sort of wars that tore through Europe and Asia in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1940s could be avoided.
One could argue that, as a result, the United States has been at war continuously for the last four decades, and some would say even longer. In the 1990s, a former—and future—Republican official named Richard Haass wrote a book, The Reluctant Sheriff, about the U.S. role in the post–Cold War world. The argument was that forging coalitions and “posses” was often both thankless and endless, but the alternative—being prepared to fight every battle alone—was even worse.
Should an agreement for a U.S. interest in Ukrainian mineral rights go through, it is not clear what country, if any, would feel a need to support the U.S. investment. Further, a future U.S. president might have a hostile relationship with a future Russian (or Ukrainian) leader, and that leader could move against U.S. interests. With fewer multilateral tools and fewer allies, the alternatives to the U.S. military fighting to secure U.S. resources would shrink. And should similar U.S. investments be scattered around the world, the requisite commitments of U.S. troops to deter aggression against them would grow.
None of this would likely mean a war during the remaining years of the Trump administration. This shift, should it occur, would accrue over decades. The pattern, however, seems relatively clear. Growing unilateral interests would require greater unilateral protection. While the expectation is that such a move would cost the United States much less in the long run than the seemingly endless demands on U.S. troops, history suggests that countries that pursue their unilateral interests do so until they can no longer sustain them.
This problem will almost certainly present itself long beyond the Trump administration, and it therefore may be of less interest to current officials. Yet, the U.S. military needs to plan decades in advance—for shipbuilding, aircraft development, force structure, basing, and more. A military that seeks to renew its focus on lethality simultaneously needs to have contingencies in mind. A solitary need to defend widely scattered national investments expands the number of contingencies significantly.
Jon B. Alterman is a senior vice president, holds the Zbigniew Brzezinski Chair in Global Security and Geostrategy, and is director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
