Trump’s Ukraine mineral deal finally lands as US economy shivers
Donald Trump promised he could sort out a peace deal for the Ukraine war in 24 hours. It still hasn’t happened. Instead the US administration has taken 100 days just to sign a mineral deal with Ukraine.
This agreement will give the US access to revenue from Ukrainian natural resources, including 100 major deposits of critical minerals. It also has huge symbolism. Ukrainians see it as a sign that the US is committed to staying involved in their country, and also as a warming of the relationship between Ukraine’s president and Trump. It will also be a signal to Russia that what hurts Ukraine could also hurt the US economy.
Of course, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calls the deal “historic” and puts its brilliance down to Trump’s amazing negotiation skills.
However, in the week that Trump celebrated 100 days in office, others would argue that Trump’s deal-making skills are nowhere near as astute as he thinks they are. That he gave Russia way too much room to manoeuvre in the early months of 2025 by leaning so clearly in Putin’s direction, allowing the Russian leader to think he could pretty much do anything he fancied and win as much of Ukraine as he desired.
But US national security advisor Michael Waltz, who has announced he is standing down, has signalled that the balance may now be shifting, when he said the minerals deal was “a momentous step” and: “Russia needs to come to the table.”
As Bridget Storrie from UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity has pointed out, this deal was all about what the global super power was going to get as justification for its support in the war, rather than about how it could increase prosperity in a war-torn country.
Andrew Gawthorpe, a lecturer in history and international studies at Leiden University, has looked at the details and believes Kyiv is getting more than many expected, and more than was on offer earlier in the year, when Trump fell out so publicly with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a White House press conference. As part of the deal Ukraine will retain ownership of its natural resources. All profits are to be invested in Ukraine for ten years after the agreement comes into force. It also looks like Washington will contribute new military aid.
Read more:
US-Ukraine minerals deal looks better for Kyiv than expected – but Trump is an unpredictable partner
Presidential power
Trump’s first 100 days have been tumultuous, not just for the US, but for most of the world. His “liberation day” tariffs on international goods have turned existing economic balances and expectations upside down.
Countries that have long seen themselves as confident allies of the US – Canada, Denmark and Germany, for instance – now see the landscape somewhat differently, given the high US tariffs that have landed on their doorsteps. No longer convinced of the strength of their relationship with the world’s superpower, many are rethinking both their economic plans and their alliances.
Meanwhile, China, the main focus of Trump’s tariffs, can see opportunities opening up to forge stronger relationships with, and sales to, other countries also looking for new markets. China has not crumbled yet under the weight of 145% US tariffs. And China’s president, Xi Jinping, is showing no sign of blinking first and heading to Washington to negotiate as Trump was clearly expecting.
Trump now swings daily from claiming he is negotiating with China and that their tariffs can come down, to stating that Beijing will cave. All that sound and fury sounds a good deal like wavering. And with US supermarket bosses warning of empty shelves around the corner, and US ports expecting traffic from China to significantly slow this month, as Nottingham University’s Chee Meng Tan sets out, there is every reason to expect Trump will cave and open negotiations before Xi Jinping does.
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China has identified how to fight back against Trump’s tariffs, and is not ready to back down
Many nations now see the US as a far less trustworthy partner now than in the past. The most obvious of these is Canada, which just elected the leader of a party that was 20 percentage points behind in the polls in January and expected to be beaten badly not long ago. But when Trump decided that he wanted Canada as the 51st state, normality went out the window over its northern border.
This week, newly elected Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said he would seek meetings with Trump with the “full knowledge that we have many, many other options than the United States”, promising to strengthen relations with “reliable partners” in Europe, Asia and elsewhere.
“We are over the shock of America’s betrayal,” he said. He is ready to write a new foreign policy. He’s not the only one.
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Two of the US’s firm friends for decades, South Korea and Taiwan, are now not so sure that they see Washington as a dependable ally, according to a report from research organisation the Brookings Institution. It saw a significant jump in the numbers of people who saw the US as untrustworthy from July 2024, to March 2025.
This matters, as Steve Dunne, a political scientist at the University of Warwick points out, because without trust people and nations are likely not to honour their commitments. After the second world war, the western allies decided to create a series of international bodies to avert such a disaster happening again, and to encourage nations to follow a set of rules that would encourage democracy and trust in each other.
In his first 100 days, says Dunne, Trump broke the compact of trust with countries that had a long alliance with the US, and that could have a deep impact on the trust that has existed for decades between western nations.
Read more:
Donald Trump’s first 100 days have badly damaged trust in America both economically and as an ally
Global power reducing?
Declining trust in the US could well reduce other forms of its global power. As well as financially and politically, in the post-war decades the US has influenced the world, by exporting its culture, its films, its television programmes and its ideas, as well as importing tourists to visit its national treasures, from Yosemite national park to New York City.
In the past 100 days, international tourists are reported to be cancelling their bookings, partly worried about the welcome, or the lack of it, they may encounter at the border. Summer airline bookings from Canada (21%), Germany (17%) and the Netherlands (12%) to the US have fallen significantly for this year, although other countries such as UK show only a minor fall.
Admittedly, Trump told voters that he wanted to put “America first”. However, at his inauguration, the president declared he wanted to make America the “most respected nation on earth”. That achievement is looking quite far off at the moment. In fact, in many countries it is going the other way.
That international respect took a significant hit at one of the most remarkable moments of the past 100 days, when Trump proceeded to take Zelensky to task publicly for a range of offences including not being grateful enough for US support and not wearing a suit.
So what has Trump achieved domestically in his first 100 days and how does that match up against the promises he made? Let’s look at some of the plans he set out in his inauguration speech.
Trump said he wanted to increase US wealth. But current economic indicators are more than a bit shaky, with US stock markets falling and rising on a regular basis as they follow Trump’s on-and-off-again announcements on tariff negotiations with various countries. On April 30, the day after Trump’s big 100 days rally, stocks fell after data was released showing a contraction in the GDP of the US in the first quarter.
But Trump has told his supporters that, in the long term, tariffs will work and manufacturing jobs will benefit. So far, Republican voters still believe in Trump’s policies on jobs and the economy, with 82% approving, according to a recent Economist/YouGov poll. Only 8% of Democrats and 32% of independent voters do though.
Many of the big decisions we have seen playing out in the first 100 days – including the Elon Musk-led dismantling of some parts of government and Trump’s swing at driving down immigration – were detailed in the Project 2025 document, published the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation before the election, says Dafydd Townley of the University of Portsmouth. But it also hints at what may come next, including more legislation restricting American women’s access to abortion further.
Read more:
How Project 2025 became the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term
On January 20 Trump thought that Americans stood “on the verge of the four greatest years in American history”. For many Americans worried about their pensions, savings and the cost of groceries, the future is not looking so great right now. But for those who were sharp focused on cutting immigration, Trump may have made the great start they were hoping for.