The Business of Peace

Donald Trump has dubbed himself “the peace president.” He promises to secure this title with the crowning achievement of his second term: an end to the nearly decade-long proxy war in Ukraine.

The contours of this ambition were revealed in a 28-point “peace plan,” which was leaked to the press in late November. The document was presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an ultimatum: accept immediate territorial concessions, a cap on Ukraine’s armed forces, and a permanent ban on NATO accession — or risk losing U.S. military aid.

Zelensky gambled on a third path. Days after Trump’s plan emerged, Europe presented a counterproposal. The document—reportedly drafted in Berlin, Paris and London—was less measured than the version drawn up in Washington. Where the U.S. plan offers vague “security guarantees,” the European alternative suggests a mutual defense pact modeled on NATO’s Article 5. It proposes freezing the conflict rather than making territorial concessions. And it leaves open the prospect of Ukraine’s NATO membership.

The European counterproposal appears designed to be rejected by Russia—part of a strategy to frame Moscow as hostile to diplomacy. “Putin must realize that he has no chance of winning this war at the expense of the European order of freedom and peace,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said, while promising further cuts to the German welfare state to fund its rearmament, a tendency we are witnessing across the continent.

The division on the continent

With Europe resolutely against peace—even as Ukraine’s defensive lines collapse—it is difficult to see how these provisions may ultimately be adopted. Moscow itself has maintained a cool distance from the discussions. While acknowledging the deal as a “substantive” step toward further dialogue, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it was “impossible to comment” on the proposal amid the “information frenzy” surrounding it.

What is clear is that there is a cold, transactional logic to the 28-point “peace plan,”—both within Europe and beyond it. Europe’s apparent impotence is not an aberration from the historic norm, but a reflection of the depth of its subordination to U.S. interests. NATO, from the start, served to transform Western Europe into a staging ground for confrontation with the Eastern Bloc.

That agenda only accelerated after the Soviet Union’s collapse. “Europeans have proven incapable, left to themselves, of settling their differences peacefully,” then Senator Joe Biden said in the opening remarks of a 1997 U.S. Senate debate on NATO enlargement. “The U.S. it seems to me must continue to lead the new security architecture for that continent.”

For the U.S., NATO expansion promised to deepen and expand U.S. influence across Eurasia, a vast region that U.S. strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the grand chessboard.” With the Soviet Union gone, the U.S. could now gain “unlimited access to this hitherto closed area,” Brzezinski wrote, securing Russia’s vast mineral wealth and a strategic bridgehead to East Asia.

But however subordinated NATO members had become to U.S. foreign policy interests, they nonetheless presented a challenge for U.S. policymakers. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. officials complained not only about Western Europe’s insufficient spending on war, but also about its relations with the countries of the Third World and occasional overtures to the Eastern Bloc. The U.S., embroiled in wars and regime change efforts around the Global South, was shouldering a major part of the burden of maintaining the imperialist system. “The Europeans get free defense and give nothing for it,” Henry Kissinger said in 1974.

Trump appears to have succeeded where his predecessors failed. Europe is not only rearming. It has also foreclosed the possibility of rapprochement with Moscow, securing its permanent dependence on the U.S. Whether or not peace in Ukraine can be secured, European rearmament means that the U.S. can pivot East, safe in the knowledge that Europe will continue to shoulder regional confrontations on its own.

Core of U.S. ‘peace deals’

This feature of Trump’s diplomatic manoeuvres is unique to Europe given the continent’s security architecture. But the Ukraine peace deal is also deeply revealing of Washington’s broader global strategy. In fact, the White House has now brokered a number of so-called “peace deals,” with others in motion. From Palestine to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to Ukraine, these processes reveal a clear pattern: one that inflames conflicts to end them, and ultimately profits from the devastation.

In Sudan, for example, the peace process is led by the “Quad Initiative”—a diplomatic grouping comprising supporters of competing factions in the war. On one hand, it includes the United Arab Emirates, the primary sponsor of the Rapid Support Forces. On the other, it includes Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which support the Sudanese Armed Forces. All are close allies of the U.S. In fact, in every peace process, the “peace” emerges on the back of extreme violence carried out with the military, financial and diplomatic support of Washington and NATO, leaving societies and resistance movements too weak to oppose the terms being imposed on them.

The logic is clear. Each peace process puts a major emphasis on U.S. access to natural resources, reconstruction and infrastructure projects. In the DRC, the peace framework brokered by Trump’s envoy Massad Boulos is linked to the Lobito Corridor—a $5-billion infrastructure project funded by the U.S. to transport critical minerals like cobalt and copper from the Congo to the Atlantic for export to the West. Here, the peace is a security guarantee for the supply chain, not the people. The violence serves to clear the land and discipline the labor force; the peace deal arrives to pave the roads for the loot.

Similarly, the Ukraine proposal contains provisions on “strategic resource partnerships” that would open the country’s vast lithium and titanium reserves to exclusive U.S. tutelage. The language mirrors the Gaza plan, where “reconstruction” is a euphemism for prime real estate development along the Mediterranean coast, a vision Jared Kushner—a former advisor to Trump and husband of his daughter, Ivanka—openly advanced even as the bombs were falling.

This is the corporate boardroom applied to statecraft. It bypasses the inconveniences of democracy and self-determination, replacing them with a direct management structure subordinated to U.S. business interests. In fact, each peace deal contains a similar governance model, involving the creation of an independent board chaired by Trump himself. Here, the sovereign state is viewed as a distressed asset, and the “peace deal” is the bankruptcy proceeding that strips it for parts.

Most significantly, none of the peace deals brokered by the U.S. actually delivered peace. In the DRC, M23 massacres continued days after the ink dried on the Washington Accord. In Palestine, the bombing of Gaza continues long after the ceasefire, while the stabilization force promised by the Trump plan essentially outsources the occupation to international mercenaries, freeing the Israeli military for other fronts.

This is not a policy failure. Rather, it represents a deliberate strategy that is in many ways the quintessence of the U.S. approach to war, which profits from war and then restructures the battlefield—sufficiently softened by the violence—into a terrain of super-exploitation. This is Washington’s business of peace.

The author is a Polish researcher, writer and organizer. He serves as political coordinator at Progressive International