A past US security pact is a cautionary tale for Ukraine’s mineral deal
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A mineral-rights deal that the Trump administration says will make the U.S. vested in Ukraine’s defense has an instructive historical precedent in Washington’s unofficial oil-for-security pact with Saudi Arabia.
For decades after World War II, Saudi security was bolstered by the presence in the kingdom of U.S. oil companies pumping crude that fueled America’s expansion, backed by an American air base. President Jimmy Carter kept the oil-for-security arrangement alive even after the Saudis nationalized their energy industry in 1980, with a new foreign-policy doctrine that guarded Persian Gulf oil-supply lines with U.S.
military might. Now the Saudis are finding economics don’t always drive Washington’s calculus about when to deploy military force, and are seeking codified defense guarantees. That is because U.S.
economic interests can shift dramatically, geopolitical analysts said. “The argument that the Ukrainians can rely on American implicit security guarantees because of American economic interest in their rare earths is a thin reed for their security," said Greg Gause, a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute think tank in Washington. In 2019, during President Trump’s first term, a suspected Iranian drone and missile attack that disrupted Saudi Arabia’s largest oil installation passed without a direct response.
That deepened growing uncertainty about whether Riyadh and other Gulf capitals could still count on the U.S. to come to their aid. They have since felt out Russia and China as additional security partners.
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