If Donald Trump is elected president of the United States, his plan to restore post-war Ukraine raises many questions and speculations. In particular, the former director of the United States Agency for International Development, Max Primorac, shared his assessment of Trump's possible strategies in a column for The Wall Street Journal .
David Urban and Mike Pompeo make a strong case for peace in Ukraine (July 26 article "Trump's Peace Plan for Ukraine"). And what about the post-war reconstruction of devastated Ukraine, which could cost a trillion dollars? Neither the US nor Europe is willing to use tax dollars to finance the reconstruction of a poor country. So how will President Trump manage to revive economically weakened Ukraine so that it can pay for its own reconstruction and defense?
During his first term, Trump said many times that hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid spending had failed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina and left other war-torn countries poor, hungry and unstable. He pushed for deep cuts in the foreign aid budget and replaced traditional grant-based aid with initiatives to expand trade and increase investment from America's vast private capital markets.
A successful plan to restore Ukraine must be based on the same principles: demand that Kyiv privatize or liquidate 3,500 state-owned enterprises that generate corruption and deplete the budget. Encourage Ukraine to open its energy, agricultural, technological and defense sectors to American investors. Implement stalled economic reforms that block the investment of billions of dollars in Ukrainian capital inside the country.
