The Sopranos, but Dumber: Trump’s Extortion Racket in Ukraine

The Trump administration has pressed home its extortionist demands that Ukraine surrender half its natural resource revenues, including minerals, gas, oil, and infrastructure earnings, in exchange for continued military support. The proposal, detailed in documents obtained by The New York Times, requires Ukraine to contribute to a $500 billion fund controlled entirely by the United States - over four times the total U.S. aid committed to Ukraine and far exceeding Ukraine's annual resource revenues of $1.1 billion.

This is resource extraction as Foreign Policy. It's an explicit shift from alliance-building, the nurturing of relationships that has been the hallmark of America abroad since before Kissinger, to a transactional quid-pro-quo. America under Trump is making no bones about what and who they are: mobsters, operating an unsophisticated protection racket, gangstering about on the world stage. The only thing missing is a violin case.

Ukraine is a vulnerable nation. It has been under attack since 2022, entirely consumed by a war it never wanted and - despite Trump's unfounded protestations to the contrary - did not start. To treat a nation in crisis like an easy mark is not just morally indefensible; it's a stupid ploy by a foolish man who is either incapable of understanding the damage he is doing to America's reputation and the world order or has been utterly compromised to the point of working against his own country.

This can only undermine U.S. strategic interests across the globe, turning the world's leading power into a cartoon, wannabe Godfather operating out of a dingy corner Pizzeria. Any ally - or potential ally - would be fools to view the United States as a responsible or reliable partner. And if Trump and his dollar-store cronies think their racketeering can accomplish any meaningful goal beyond the long-term enrichment of China and Russia, they can think again.

For anyone other than Trump and his faithful, the mathematical impossibility of meeting Donald Trump's $500 billion demand is not difficult to grasp. Even if Ukraine were to come close to meeting America's Sopranos-cosplaying demands, it would cripple a Western ally and demonstrate the self-destructive stupidity of a nuclear power whose co-presidents are so senile and so Ketamine-addled that they cannot see the woods for the trees they are barreling into at high speed.

Putin's anti-Western narrative has always relied on depicting American and European leaders as untrustworthy, unreliable, greedy, and grasping. Trump's belligerence plays into that image so thoroughly it's as if he had been handed a script. Europe is watching, with dismay, as an alliance built on trust becomes a fractured relationship built on gimme, gimme, gimme. No global leader believes they can trust Putin. But at least they're used to him. Trump is something new. And that makes him more dangerous and less trustworthy.

There are implications here for the principles of international sovereignty. What happens when a powerful nation essentially seizes control of a smaller country's natural resources - almost at gunpoint? It's better than exploitation through invasion, but certainly not by much. And it throws international law into disrepute. There is no ethical, legal, or logical basis for demanding payment for defensive aid that would, in its balance against Russia's increasing imperialism, serve America's interests.

Short-termism is the name of the game in Trump's Presidency. It's always now, never later, the human tenure trap playing out with massive global consequences. This is not a man who thinks about the future and plans for the next generation; Donald Trump acts in the selfish interests of the selfish moment, consequences be damned. It's the defining feature of his business career, and it will be the damning feature of his legacy.

Long after Trump has left office - one way or another - the repercussions of his tit-for-tat decision-making, his extraction, his intimidation, and his poor impulse control will still be felt. For Trump, that may be the point - a legacy of pain and a damaged world bearing the imprint of his boot may beat out the prospect of having no legacy.

But Trump's enablers, his Republican peons, his Yes-men, and his platinum blonde entourage, will have to live the rest of their lives with the stain of America's shame and its decline into fascism and mobsterism. And Europe, spurned by the United States while it pursues selfish, short-sighted profit, will not forget: Trump's America is the Sopranos but dumber.