- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
- cross-posted to:
- europe@feddit.org
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25722259
FYI: I ended up posting this with some reservation. Pravda’s mediabias is mostly factual. The story sounds quite credible. Other media’s report are more or less similar, but weren’t as complete. check out telegraph
No, and that’s actually what concerns me from a US perspective. The arrangements that Trump were making weren’t with the US as beneficiary, but a private entity in the US.
That is, it could be unethical or bad foreign policy or whatever for Trump to ask for a hard bargain for the US. But aside from that, the issue here is that Trump can potentially be asking for a hard bargain that benefits him personally, not – or not exclusively – the US in aggregate. The arrangement was not between the US and Ukraine, but between a private entity in the US and Ukraine.
Ukraine is not the only country that the Trump administration will have dealings with. Corruption is a concern for people in the US. If the next thing that Trump gets up to regarding US policy is to go to the next country over and asks, in a private communication between his legal team and another country, for a lot of assets to be transferred to a private entity in the US in order for the US to take some official action, that is a problem for the American public.
The US has always made such deals that benefit US private corporations, not the government. It’s not the US government that extracted oil in Saudi Arabia. It was US private corporations. It wasn’t the US government that exploited labor and nature to grow bananas in the Caribbean, it was US private corporations.