Round-up: Ukraine's mythical minerals. Trump crashes the economy. Kamala Harris' comeback

Analysis of the week's events

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Ukraine’s mythical minerals

Kyiv and Washington signed a deal regarding the joint exploitation of Ukraine’s mineral wealth this week, and I wrote in The Conversation about why it’s not likely to ultimately be that big of a deal - the minerals aren’t easily extractable, if they even exist:

The American humorist Mark Twain is said to have once defined a mine as "a hole in the ground owned by a liar”. Assessing the precise scale of underground mineral deposits is notoriously difficult – and not every deposit can be extracted in a profitable fashion.

In Ukraine, the exploratory work has simply not been done. Even the supposed size of the deposits, which are based on old Soviet surveys conducted in a superficial fashion, is not certain.

Many of the minerals that supposedly lie under Ukraine’s surface are so called “rare earths”, which are critical to hi-tech supply chains. But they are also expensive and time-consuming to exploit, requiring a massive upfront investment which may eventually be lost. Even in successful cases, it generally takes over a decade to get production onstream.

Today, there are few rare-earth projects under development anywhere in the world outside China – even in countries that are not current (and possibly future) war zones. Most of Ukraine’s supposed deposits lie in the east of the country in areas vulnerable to Russian attack, making investment risky.

But there’s also another element to this story which I find bizarre, and which I didn’t have space to cover in that piece.

Say that there actually were vast quantities of rare earths in Ukraine which could be extracted in an economic fashion. Assume that the U.S. was building the processing capacity necessary to refine them (which it isn’t). Even in that world, this deal doesn’t make any sense.

It doesn’t make any sense for two reasons. The first is that Ukraine cannot possibly become a reliable source of rare earths for the United States for the simple reason that its hypothetical rare-earth producing regions lay a short drive away from one of the few military forces on Earth that the United States cannot and will not go to war with. If secure rare earth supply chains are vital to U.S. national security and must be secure in wartime, it makes about as much sense to locate them in Donetsk and Luhansk as it does in Shanghai.

The second, related, reason that the deal makes no sense is that it reveals a massive inconsistency in the Trump administration’s perception of Ukraine’s value to the United States.

The administration’s top officials have spent years saying that Ukraine is basically an unimportant backwater and that it makes no difference to American national interests who controls it. Now they’ve suddenly changed their mind and want us to believe that actually Ukraine is just a few investments away from being a vital node in the U.S. military industrial complex. If nothing else, their inconsistency calls into question their competence - did they just notice the country’s indispensability since taking office?