The Wall Street Journal, not exactly known for progressive crusades, just lit a match under the political internet with a report that reads like a geopolitical thriller—except this one has Trumpworld figures allegedly eyeing massive profits in the middle of a war.
The Journal’s weekend piece, Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine, doesn’t waste time getting to the point. It claims: “The Kremlin pitched the White House on peace through business. To Europe’s dismay, the president and his envoy are on board.”
If that weren’t enough to make foreign-policy veterans reach for antacids, the report goes even deeper into how that pitch was supposedly orchestrated. As the WSJ wrote, “For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials.”
The paper continues, “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.”
That’s the kind of language that makes diplomats choke on their coffee.
Online, the reaction was instant and explosive.
David Frum, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, didn’t mince words, calling it a “devastating report on the real Trump-Russia deal: betray Ukraine in exchange for privileged business benefits for Trump insiders.”
Garry Kasparov, longtime pro-democracy activist and Putin critic, said the quiet part loud: “As I said in my Halifax speech a few days before this damning WSJ report, this has always been personal business for Trump, not national interest.”
And he didn’t stop there. “It’s how Putin turned Russia into a mafia state and it’s been Trump’s goal from day one of his new unleashed admin,” he added Saturday.
Kasparov pushed even further, cutting through the swirl of theories that always crop up around Trump’s motivations: “And also as happened with Putin, politicians and pundits spend too much time looking for complicated motivations from ideology or psychology or blackmail. It’s money. It’s always money. They’re crooks. With immense power, but still crooks. Don’t overcomplicate things.”
Bloomberg Opinion’s Ronald Brownstein summed up what many reporters were thinking: “If the betting markets did Pulitzer odds, this remarkably reported [WSJ] piece would be a comet.”
The Journal’s report doesn’t just raise eyebrows—it detonates them. If true, it suggests a foreign-policy approach driven less by strategy or ideology and more by the pursuit of eye-watering business deals, even if they reshape alliances or leave Ukraine out in the cold.
