Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman on Wednesday took a blowtorch to what he described as President Donald Trump's "depraved and stupid" plan to end Russia's three-year invasion of Ukraine.
Writing on his Substack page, Krugman explained that the "deal" Trump offered Ukraine was for it to hand over 50 percent of the revenue it generates from resource extraction in exchange for essentially nothing.
While some observers have compared the Trump plan to the punitive measures taken against Germany after World War I, Krugman sees it as something far more primitive than even that.
"Trump’s vision reminds me more of old-fashioned imperialism, in which powerful nations tried to seize the wealth of less-powerful nations just because they could," he argues. "This doesn’t look to me like Weimar Germany in the 1920s; it looks like the Belgian Congo in the late 19th century, a personal possession of King Leopold which he brutally exploited for its rubber and ivory."
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While the "depravity" of such an arrangement should be obvious, continues Krugman, Americans should also understand that the entire enterprise is also "deeply stupid."
"In a world in which a nation’s wealth rests on its ability to produce goods and services, seizing another country’s resources can never be worth enough to justify the money and blood expended to carry out the theft," he contends. "Suppose that we indulge Trump’s fantasy that we could extract $500 billion — two and a half times Ukraine’s prewar annual GDP! — from the beleaguered nation. That would still be only 1.7 percent of annual U.S. GDP, and it would be spread over many years, so it would at most add a small fraction of one percent to U.S. national income."
Added to this, writes Krugman, there is simply no way for the U.S. to ever make good on the bargain because "if Ukraine were to lose, and Putin takes over, he wouldn’t honor the deal."