No, you heard it right. Last week in a Fox News appearance, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said outright that the war in Ukraine is “about money.”
Namely, Graham told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the U.S. stands to financially gain from Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector and “two to seven trillion dollars’ worth” of rare earth minerals alike in a prospective wartime deal with the war-torn, albeit resource-wealthy, nation.
“This war is about money. People don’t talk much about it. But you know, the richest country in all of Europe for rare earth minerals is Ukraine. Two to seven trillion dollars’ worth of minerals that are rare earth minerals, very relevant to the 21st century,” Graham declared. “Ukraine’s ready to do a deal with us, not the Russians. So it’s in our interest to make sure that Russia doesn’t take over the place.”
“[Ukraine] is the bread basket of…the developing world,” Graham mused. “Fifty percent of all the food going to Africa comes from Ukraine.”
Graham also emphasized that the incoming Trump administration is uniquely positioned to cash out on such resources. “Donald Trump is going to do a deal to get our money back, to enrich ourselves with rare earth minerals. A good deal for Ukraine and us,” Graham said. “And he’s going to bring peace.”
Trump has suggested repeatedly that he wants to bring all sides to the table to talk in order to end the war. Graham has been consistently on the other side of the debate where he has wanted Ukraine to keep fighting at all costs.
Yet Graham insists that Ukraine will benefit from the prospective “deal” he describes. His own history of hawkish comments, where he previously said that “with American weapons and money, Ukraine will fight Russia to the last Ukrainian,” suggests Ukrainians' best interests and meaningful peace both rank low amongst his priorities.
Notably, this isn’t the first time Graham has suggested that the U.S. could benefit from access to Ukraine’s natural resources. “[Ukrainians are] sitting on a trillion dollars’ worth of minerals that could be good to our economy,” Graham said in a video clip from September, where he was standing next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Meanwhile, war fatalities continue to mount, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in September that over a million people have died or been wounded in the Russia-Ukraine war since its inception. To hawks like Graham, such fatalities seem to be an acceptable price to pay in an apparent bid for Ukraine’s natural resources.
Stavroula Pabst is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft.
Top image credit: U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) attends a news briefing amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine March 18, 2024. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich
Passing with a vote of 217-213 mostly along party lines — only one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) broke ranks to vote against it — the CR now proceeds to the Senate, which needs to pass something by 11:59 p.m. Friday to avoid a government shutdown. Although Republicans will need bipartisan support for the CR to pass there, Senate Democrats, weary of the political costs of a shutdown, seem increasingly likely to comply.
Part of the House CR’s defense boost would go toward increased pay for troops. But the CR would also bolster the Pentagon’s flexibility to make new weapons purchases, even though such a measure would not typically be included in a continuing resolution.
And, while the CR sets aside previously requested funds for two Arleigh Burke class destroyers, it also fronts $1.5 billion toward a third one to be built — even though the Navy has not requested funds for another one.
Some lawmakers are frustrated by the choice to ram through additional defense spending at a critical political moment, when politicians are weighing the CR’s budget cuts with the political risks of a government shutdown.
“We know that there is a $6 billion in defense spending increase [in the CR]. That is not something the majority of Democrats, including myself, are in support of,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said, expressing her opposition to the CR on CNN. “Especially when they are making $13 billion in cuts to programs that people care about.”
“I’d like verification that in the future that we’re going to reduce the spending at the Pentagon,” Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said, explaining his weariness towards the CR on Monday. “There's savings in [the CR] and they're making cuts in different departments, but the Pentagon always gets (more money),” he told CNN. Typically against CRs, Burchett ultimately voted for the bill.
U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has called to increase military spending, invoking the China threat to warn against a CR-sparked return to last year’s defense spending levels.
“Spending the entire year under the FY2024 funding level will mean no money or authorization for 168 new programs — many of which are required to outcompete China in space and cyberspace,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “In the race to project power and deter aggression across the Indo-Pacific, it would put U.S. forces and our regional allies even further behind.”
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Top photo credit: George Air Force Base is a former United States Air Force base located about 75 miles northeast of Los Angeles, California. The facility was closed by the Base Realignment and Closure (or BRAC) 1992 commission at the end of the Cold War. It is now the site of Southern California Logistics Airport and a National Guard drone training facility. (Flickr/Creative Commons/slworking2)
In his search for saving taxpayers’ money, President Trump recently directed Elon Musk and the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to take a closer look at the Pentagon. And their search is apparently already paying off.
“They’re finding massive amounts of fraud, abuse, waste, all of these things,” Trump declared.
If the administration is truly committed to cutting waste and maximizing efficiency, it should direct the Pentagon to examine how it is using its vast real estate holdings — an estimated 26 million acres in the United States alone. And if the Department of Defense were to make such an assessment, it is likely that it would justify another round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), a process last initiated in 2005, in which an independent commission helps to select a list of bases to be realigned or closed, in consultation with affected communities.
Between 2013 and 2017, the Pentagon repeatedly requested another BRAC. The new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, seems open to the idea. In a series of responses in advance of his confirmation, Hegseth explained, “I will work with leaders in the Department and across the Executive Branch to assess whether another BRAC round is needed. If the President were to determine a BRAC is appropriate, we will work with Congress to identify and implement process improvements.”
This is where DOGE could help move the needle. For nearly a decade, a few members of Congress have steadfastly blocked any consideration of base closure or realignment, despite the fact that a 2017 Pentagon study found that it has 19% more capacity than it needs. If many of the Pentagon’s facilities are underutilized, or even entirely unused, releasing this land to be redeveloped could generate revenue for the federal government, and benefits to the surrounding communities.
This underutilization is precisely the kind of problem that DOGE is designed to root out. According to one estimate, savings from the prior five rounds of BRAC save taxpayers $12 billion annually.
“There are strong indications DOGE wants to reduce the federal government’s real property footprint and see if there is a way to cut some savings loose from DoD’s installations and infrastructure, though it remains to be seen if it will look or smell anything like BRAC,” explained Assistant Commander for BRAC Andy Napoli during a phone call with the authors.
Without Congressional approval to formally close bases, however, the Pentagon may quietly cut personnel and operations at certain facilities across the country, and redeploy them elsewhere. Ten years ago, Anthony Principi, chairman of the last BRAC, warned against such a "stealth" BRAC. “These reductions have a serious economic impact on local communities,” Principi wrote, “who are helpless to counter the Pentagon’s decisions.”
A stealth BRAC not only harms military communities, it also decreases military readiness. Blocking BRAC, Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) explained in 2016, “has the harmful and unintended consequence of forcing the Military Departments to consider cuts at all installations, without regard to military value.”
Under such circumstances, the military, the taxpayers, and the surrounding communities, would be better off with a formal closure, which would eventually deliver the property over to redevelopment.
We can see how this has played out from some of the bases and communities included in the 2005 BRAC. Take, for example, the case of Fort Gillem in suburban Atlanta. The former Army logistics hub is now the Gillem Logistics Center, home to a 1.3 million-square-foot warehouse for the Kroger grocery chain, as well as distribution centers for global brands such as Amazon, Boeing, Cummins, and Kuehne & Nagel. The facility is valued for its close proximity to Hartfield Jackson International, one of the nation’s busiest airports, as well as major interstate highways.
Those same factors attracted BlueStar Studios which currently operates two 20,000-square-foot sound stages, with plans to eventually have fourteen. BlueStar Studio CEO Rich Goldberg announced in 2022 that "Ninety-plus percent of the jobs” at the studio would be “for local Atlantans.”
We can also look at what happened at the former Naval Air Station Brunswick in Maine. A facility that once hosted sub-hunting P-3 Orion aircraft, but was mostly off-limits to civilians, now features a wide array of businesses, including a brewery in the former small arms firing range, and a public golf course. TechPlace, a business incubator, has helped launch start-ups in critical sectors such as aerospace, advanced materials, and life sciences.
Plus, there are 1,470 housing units on former base land, including over 500 constructed since 2018. The Midcoast Regional Redevelopment Authority (MRRA), which is responsible for managing the property, reported late last year that over $272 million in “new property valuation has been added to the property tax rolls in the town of Brunswick” accounting for over $6.5 million “in new property tax revenues for FY 2025.”
Even if Congress isn’t ready to consider a BRAC, they should not block a public assessment of the military’s needs. It has been eight years since the Pentagon released a formal study on excess capacity. And, as that report noted, it did not “provide the details necessary to identify specific infrastructure for elimination.” As part of a new assessment, the Pentagon could estimate possible savings from a future BRAC round.
“Even if DOGE does not recommend a round of base closures — which I doubt they will because their reform time horizon is much faster than the multi-year BRAC process -— the effects of what DOGE does recommend or implement could potentially rekindle interest in something like a BRAC process for rationalizing missions and functions across DoD after the fact,” said Napoli. “I could imagine DOGE analysts questioning why each military department needs certain functions of its own and directing development of plans to potentially consolidate functions into fewer locations, which is actually quite similar to what aspects of the 2005 round of BRAC recommended,” he added.
If DOGE directs the consolidation of a particular functional area or the downsizing of a certain workforce and leaves the implementation details to still be worked out, members of Congress might step in and request a more formal review to ensure they and their constituents have a seat at the table. This broadens stakeholder and community involvement — and diffuses the political downsides if the axe falls hard on a particular location.
If Trump is serious about cutting waste in the Pentagon, and also committed to helping mostly rural communities that are adjacent to many military bases, a new round of BRAC might fit the bill. After all, the Pentagon’s problems of excess and underutilized capacity will exist far beyond DOGE’s expiration date of July 2026.
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Top image credit: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attend a documents signing ceremony in Moscow, Russia January 17, 2025. REUTERS/Evgenia Novozhenina/Pool
After Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s moderate president, entered office last August, he stressed his readiness to negotiate with the United States. Despite fierce opposition by regime hardliners, he appointed as vice president for strategic affairs former Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, an architect of the 2015 nuclear agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), between Iran and the P5+1 countries — the five permanent members of the United Nations Security (UNSC) council plus Germany. The two seemed to enjoy the full support of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, in a speech last August, declared that there was “no barrier” to negotiations.
Zarif penned two pieces, published by Foreign Affairs and the Economist, and granted an interview to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria in which he emphasized Iran’s readiness to engage the United States and the West. These public offerings would almost certainly not have happened had Khamenei not approved. In fact, the sole purpose of Zarif’s presence in the new Pezeshkian administration was to prepare for negotiations with the United States. Indeed, given the relentless attacks on Zarif by Iran’s hardliners, he could join the new administration only if Khamenei gave his blessing. Other former and current Iranian officials have also expressed strong support for negotiations.
Hopes for negotiations rose after President Donald Trump won last November’s election. He, too, said repeatedly that he wants to negotiate with Iran, although he also kept threatening it with military action.
Those hopes were, however, dashed when Trump signed an executive order last month to bring back the “maximum pressure” policy of his first term — essentially the plan by his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton to either force Iran to “capitulate” or to attack Iran militarily.
While negotiations between Iran and the United States should take place, no self-respecting nation, let alone Iran, a proud nation with 7,000 years of written history, will agree to negotiate if it is asked to capitulate. Khamenei’s reaction was no different: In a speech only a week after he had again signaled his support for negotiations, he angrily denounced the idea, saying, “You should not negotiate with such a government, it is unwise, it is not intelligent, it is not honorable to negotiate.”
After Khamenei’s denunciation, Zarif was forced out of the government by hardliners and returned to his teaching at the University of Tehran, since there was no purpose for him to remain in the government.
Trump told Fox Business Sunday that he had sent a letter to Khamenei. “I hope you’re going to negotiate,” he said, “because if we have to go in militarily it’s going to be a terrible thing for them.”
Despite the threat, the fact that he sent the letter is positive. But to bear fruit, it must be backed up by action. The president should suspend imposing the “maximum pressure” policy until negotiations take place and their outcome becomes clear.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had already said as much, “We will not enter any direct negotiations with the U.S. so long as they continue their maximum pressure policy and their threats, but it doesn’t mean that, regarding our nuclear program, we will not negotiate with other parties; we are talking with the three European countries, we are negotiating with Russia and China…”
Trump has said that he needs guarantees that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons. Iranian officials point to Khamenei’s Fatwa [religious edict] banning production of weapons of mass destruction, as that guarantee. This may not be reassurance enough for the West, but there is already a strong guarantee of the sort that Trump seeks.
On January 17, Iran and Russia signed an agreement for strategic cooperation. The agreement came about despite the Rand Corporation’s prediction in 2023 that, “The transactional quality of Russian-Iran relationship inhibits the development of a boarder strategic partnership.” Dana Stroul of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy had also declared that “although Russia played a helpful role in past international efforts to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its reliance on Iranian military support will erode its willingness to enforce global nuclear nonproliferation norms.”
While immediate assessments of the new agreement by mainstream U.S. media as well as the major Washington major think tanks on which the media rely, either claimed that it revolved around the Russia-Ukraine conflict or that it was of limited significance, a closer look indicates its potential importance and relevance to nuclear policy. Article 10 of the agreement states that,
“The Contracting Parties shall cooperate closely on arms control, disarmament, non-proliferation, and international security issues within the framework of the relevant international treaties and international organizations to which they are parties, and hold consultations regularly on these matters…”
If we accord the conventional meaning of the words, the key phrase, “non-proliferation… within the framework of the relevant international treaties” must refer to adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty(NPT). In addition, recall that, prior to the JCPOA, Russia did not hesitate to join other U.N. Security Council permanent members in imposing crippling sanctions against Iran whenever it determined that Tehran had violated its international obligations; it did not veto even one out of the six UNSC resolutions that imposed sanctions on Iran.
Iran complied fully with the JCPOA and restricted its uranium enrichment to the level it specified for a full year after the first Trump administration withdrew from the deal in 2018. The fact that Iran has agreed to uphold the NPT’s major requirement of peaceful nuclear activities under a binding bilateral agreement with a major world power is legal affirmation of its religiously declared position on prohibition of nuclear arms.
If Iran elects to pursue the nuclear arms path, the economic ramifications of any violation, including the loss of financial benefits promised in the agreement, will be severe enough for it to think again, let alone putting itself at the risk of having its nuclear facilities bombed by the U.S. and Israel.
It is in this context that Russia, Iran’s main partner in building nuclear reactors and related facilities, has undertaken a commitment, in accordance with Article 23 of the agreement, to continue and expand partnership with Iran in the future. It provides,
“The Contracting Parties shall promote the development of long-term and mutually beneficial relations for the purpose of implementing joint projects in the area of peaceful use of nuclear energy, including the construction of nuclear energy facilities.”
Thus, the agreement provides more incentive for Iran to abide by its international obligations, including not violating the NPT. Given that it is not in Russia’s strategic interest for Iran to be armed with nuclear weapons, that Iran needs Russia at this critical juncture, and that Trump seemingly enjoys good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the agreement’s Articles 10 and 23 provide strong guarantees for a non-nuclear Iran.
If, however, such guarantees are ignored, and the United States and/or Israel attack Iran, all bets will be off.
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