A past US security pact is a cautionary tale for Ukraine’s mineral deal

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.

The U.S. did protect the Saudis in 1990, sending half a million troops to repel Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, which threatened Saudi oil fields, the stability of global energy markets and America’s ally, Israel.

President Jimmy Carter, giving the State of the Union address in 1980, made it U.S. policy to commit military power to guarding Persian Gulf oil-supply lines.

In the lead-up to Saddam’s invasion, the U.S. still saw the Persian Gulf through a Cold War prism as a strategic asset that needed to be protected, Gause said. Three decades later when the Saudi facilities were hit, the U.S. had shed that perspective and largely weaned itself off oil coming from the Middle East, while tiring of seemingly endless conflicts in the region.

Washington and Kyiv are now close to completing a minerals deal ahead of separate U.S.-mediated talks with Moscow on ending the war. A signing ceremony was pushed back after last month’s Oval Office blowup between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Vice President JD Vance. Zelensky initially said any mineral-rights deal would need security guarantees for Ukraine, but he later seemed to soften that stance and become amenable to signing it without such explicit assurances, saying they would come later.

“If you want real security guarantees, if you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine," Vance told Fox News a few days after the acrimonious meeting.

Even if a cease-fire is secured, Ukraine will likely continue to face an existential threat from Russia, which has stated its intention to end Ukrainian sovereignty. But when even America’s formal commitments—such as those enshrined in the NATO alliance—are being called into question, there may be no alternative.

Under the terms of the proposed U.S.-Ukraine agreement, Ukraine would pay some proceeds from future mineral-resource development into a fund that would invest in projects in Ukraine. The size of the U.S.’s stake in the fund and joint ownership deals would be hashed out in future agreements.

The deal doesn’t include explicit security guarantees, though Trump has said that there would be international peacekeepers in Ukraine. Getting American companies to invest in Ukraine’s mining sector, he argues, is the best possible guarantee of the country’s security.

Environmental scientists at the site of an undeveloped lithium deposit in central Ukraine last month.Workers operating machinery at an open-pit titanium mine in Ukraine. A U.S.-Ukraine mineral-development agreement could bring investment.

“I wouldn’t couch it as a security guarantee," Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 12 after meeting with Ukrainian officials in Saudi Arabia. “But certainly if the United States has a vested economic interest that’s generating revenue for our people as well as for the people of Ukraine, we’d have a vested interest in protecting it if it were to be challenged or threatened."

Ukraine is already predisposed to be wary of international promises. The country gave up nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union after the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which the U.S., the U.K. and Russia provided security assurances that force wouldn’t be used against Ukraine’s territorial integrity or independence. Twenty years later, Russia illegally annexed Crimea and faced little international resistance.

In comparison with Saudi Arabia’s security pact with the U.S., Ukraine would be starting off behind. The American and Saudi oil sectors and militaries were closely intertwined for decades before the Carter Doctrine was established.

By contrast, Ukraine’s commodities industry faced major obstacles to foreign investment, even before the war left 40% of its critical mineral deposits under Russian control. If U.S. companies do eventually go into Ukraine, it would take years for them to start operating. And even then, there is no guarantee they would be profitable, which could jeopardize any U.S. security commitments.

Extractive industries in foreign countries have historically produced U.S. security relationships, including in parts of Central and South America as well as Southeast Asia. But that usually happens organically over the span of decades, said Michael Wahid Hanna, U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group. Ukraine probably doesn’t have that much time, and the mechanics of a minerals-for-security pact are still hazy and hard to map out.

“They want security guarantees and this isn’t it. This is an idea of perhaps if things develop in a certain way the U.S. will be invested in Ukrainian security and stability," he said. “That might be as much as they can get, but it’s not a security guarantee and it’s pretty speculative all the way around."

“It’s hard to imagine it all coming together in such a way that produces that investment, security and stability," Hanna said.

Even if the stars were to align for American mining companies in Ukraine, changes in the global economy could shift the emphasis away from the commodities there or make another location more attractive to investors, upending the accompanying U.S. security commitments.

President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris Yeltsin and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in 1994, after signing a trilateral pact that provided security assurances to Ukraine.

Trump has also said he wants the U.S. to be independent of foreign sources of energy, which could reasonably be extended to include critical minerals amid a global scramble against China, the main rival for scarce resources.

And skeptics say that Trump, who has already spoken publicly about doing deals in Russia, could easily strike a counterdeal with Putin that would undermine any security commitments to Ukraine coming from a minerals agreement.

H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow in geopolitics and security at the Center for American Progress think tank in Washington, said it seemed unlikely that the mineral deal would shore up security across all of Ukraine.

“It wouldn’t be the source of a security backstop as much as it would be a way to tell the Russians, ‘Can you avoid doing stuff around these areas or avoid attacking the lines that would connect American business to those particular points?’ " he said.

Some argue that Trump’s realpolitik approach is more effective than one based on preserving the U.S.-led rules-based order set up after World War II. But historian Daniel Immerwahr points out that the U.S. has often expended tremendous amounts of blood and treasure, including in its longest wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, to preserve a particular global system without an immediate transactional economic benefit on offer.

“If you could get on the right side of that," he said, “you could be sure the U.S. would fight for 20 years rather than lose face and prestige."

Write to Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com