Trump Only Believes in Wars for Profit

By framing conflicts as money-making ventures, Lindsey Graham has convinced the former president to send troops and weapons.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before his speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center on March 4, 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

TRADITIONALLY, WHEN THE UNITED STATES goes to war, our president says it’s for democracy, human rights, or some other noble cause. But Donald Trump doesn’t care about such things. Republicans who work in foreign policy—even those who pretend in public that Trump is a good man—know this. That’s why, when they want him to support military intervention abroad, they speak to him in the only language he understands: money.

Sen. Lindsey Graham has been at this game for nearly a decade. In Afghanistan and Syria, Graham used the prospect of exploitable natural resources—lithium in Afghanistan, oil in Syria—to talk Trump into keeping American troops in those countries. Now Graham is repeating the same tactic in Europe. He’s telling Trump that by sending money and weapons to Kyiv, the United States can eventually extract mineral wealth from Ukraine.

Trump has always viewed war as a financial enterprise. In January 2017, speaking at the CIA on his second day as president, he complained that the United States hadn’t used its invasion of Iraq to seize some of that country’s petroleum. “To the victor belong the spoils,” Trump declared. In two phone calls later that year, he tried to shake down Iraq’s prime minister for a share of the country’s oil.

America still had troops in Syria, and Trump resented that we weren’t getting an economic return on that investment. So in October 2019, he announced that he would withdraw U.S. forces from Syria. He said our involvement there was costing us too much money, and he pledged to use the military only “where it is to our benefit.”

Graham recognized that arguments about fighting terrorism and standing with our allies weren’t moving Trump. The only way to change the president’s mind about the withdrawal was to persuade him that by staying in Syria, we could exploit the country’s oil. So Graham and retired Army Gen. Jack Keane met with Trump, showed him a map of oil fields in areas where our troops were deployed, and pitched him on the benefits of controlling the oil.

The pitch worked. Trump agreed to leave troops in Syria, and Graham praised him as a business genius. “I was so impressed with his thinking about the oil,” Graham effused on Fox News. “We’re on the verge of a joint venture between us and the Syrian Democratic Forces . . . to modernize the oil fields and make sure they get the revenue—not the Iranians, not Assad. And it can help pay for our small commitment.”

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THE SAME THING HAPPENED, in a slightly different form, in Afghanistan. Trump didn’t care about the country, its people, or fighting terrorism there. But he loved the idea that—as he told Alex Jones in 2015—“Afghanistan is rich with minerals.” So in December 2016, soon after Trump was elected, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and others in the Kabul government began to pitch him on the prospect of exploiting the country’s lithium deposits.

As the New York Times noted, this was a sharp turnabout:

During the Obama administration, President Ghani resisted the rapid development of the mining industry, largely because he worried about the threat of widespread corruption that would come with it.

But as soon as Mr. Trump was elected, Mr. Ghani reversed his position, contacting the Trump team and promoting Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. He realized that Mr. Trump would be intrigued by the commercial possibilities, officials said.

In July 2017, Trump told his advisers that—as later recounted by Reuters—“the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth in exchange for its assistance to the Afghan government.” And in September, according to the Wall Street Journal, Trump told Ghani “that Afghanistan’s natural resources, including large deposits of copper, iron ore and gold, should help pay for the war.”

But as the war’s costs piled up, and as Trump became frustrated with the lack of progress toward American profits from Afghan mines, he talked more and more about withdrawing troops, as he had in Syria. Again, Graham stepped in. In December 2019, Stars and Stripes reported:

Graham said he has highlighted the potential value of Afghanistan’s rare minerals, in an attempt to convince the president to maintain an American interest in that country. He compared the effort to another recent strategy to convince Trump to leave troops in a country that he desired to leave—using U.S. troops to secure oil fields in eastern Syria.

“The minerals in Afghanistan could be well over $1 trillion. Lithium and other really valuable minerals,” Graham said. “One thing President Trump really wants to do is look at those resources differently.”

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NOW THE SAME PATTERN IS UNFOLDING in Ukraine. On February 10, Trump ruled out any further uncompensated aid to Kyiv. On Truth Social, he announced:

NO MONEY IN THE FORM OF FOREIGN AID SHOULD BE GIVEN TO ANY COUNTRY UNLESS IT IS DONE AS A LOAN. . . . IF THE COUNTRY WE ARE HELPING EVER TURNS AGAINST US, OR STRIKES IT RICH SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE, THE LOAN WILL BE PAID OFF AND THE MONEY RETURNED TO THE UNITED STATES. WE SHOULD NEVER GIVE MONEY ANYMORE WITHOUT THE HOPE OF A PAYBACK, OR WITHOUT “STRINGS” ATTACHED.

So Graham and some other Republican senators went to work. In a conference call, as later reported by NBC News, they talked to Trump about “linking Ukraine’s mineral supply to the aid package.” On Face the Nation, Graham credited Trump with the scheme: “I spoke to President Trump earlier in the week about making the aid to Ukraine a loan. This was his idea, not mine. . . . Ukraine has minerals.” Later, Graham repeated his message on Meet the Press: “They have tons of minerals in Ukraine.”

Again, the pitch worked. Trump agreed to the loan idea, and House Republicans—who had held up the aid based on his opposition—allowed the aid-as-loan proposal to come to the floor for a vote. Graham celebrated the win and the prospective payoff. “Ukraine has the potential to be a very wealthy country as it is sitting on trillions of dollars of critical minerals,” he tweeted on March 22. “President Trump’s loan proposal is a common sense solution.”

The challenge now is to keep Trump on board with defending Ukraine. Last week, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, echoing previous comments by Trump, defended Vladimir Putin’s phony excuses for invading Ukraine. Graham responded by reminding Trump that there’s money to be made. “They’re sitting on $10 to 12 trillion of critical minerals in Ukraine. They could be the richest country in all of Europe,” Graham boasted on Face the Nation. “If we help Ukraine now, they can become the best business partner we ever dreamed of.”

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IF TRUMP RETURNS TO POWER, this will be his foreign policy. The “new model,” as described by Republican lawmakers who have conferred with him, would substitute loans for foreign aid, with recipient countries “putting up natural resources or other valuable assets as collateral.” Graham says the new policy should apply to Israel and Taiwan, among others. He told NBC News: “If Trump wins, you’ll see more of this, not less.”

It all goes back to the oil. Two months ago, Graham reminded the Journal that Trump

has always embraced the concept of collateral. Graham pointed to Trump’s past comments about Iraq, when he said the U.S. should “take the oil,” saying that was never intended literally, but rather, as a form of collateral. “Trump’s foreign policy has always been about leverage—what is in America’s interest,” he said.

Graham calls this policy “America First.” But it’s also a redefinition of America. If we’re just another empire that uses money and weapons to exploit the resources of other countries, are we beating Russia and China? Or are we joining them?