Can We Still Call It Strength When Others Pay the Price?

When Donald Trump says Ukraine needs a new president because its leader has not made a deal, the question is not only whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy has negotiated well. It is what kind of settlement is being called peace, who has the power to impose it, and who will live with its consequences.

On 10 October, Trump said Ukraine should get a new leader capable of making a deal. Yet a country resisting invasion cannot be judged as though it were negotiating an ordinary commercial contract. The relevant measure is not simply whether its president can end the fighting quickly. It is whether any settlement preserves the political independence of the people expected to live under it. A ceasefire may stop the immediate violence; a settlement that rewards aggression may also make the next violence more likely. Deutsche Welle reported Trump’s remarks.

This is not to say Zelenskyy is beyond criticism, or that Ukraine can dictate every term. Leaders at war must answer for strategy, governance and the choices available to their people. But the suffering inflicted by an aggressor cannot automatically be presented as evidence that the victim’s leader has failed. That logic shifts responsibility from the party using force to the party forced to endure it. It mistakes a coerced concession for a durable peace.

Ukraine’s nuclear history gives this argument a particular gravity. After the Soviet Union collapsed, a large Soviet nuclear arsenal remained on Ukrainian territory. Ukraine agreed to transfer the weapons to Russia and, in 1994, joined the Budapest Memorandum. The signatories undertook to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The weapons had been created as part of the Soviet system, rather than forming a fully independent Ukrainian deterrent, and the memorandum was not a mutual-defence treaty. Those distinctions matter. So does the larger lesson: a country’s decision to disarm and the security it receives in return are not the same thing. The BBC has explained the Soviet origins of the arsenal and its presence on Ukrainian soil.

The lesson is not that every agreement can prevent war. It is that states make consequential choices in reliance on the commitments of more powerful countries. When those commitments prove inadequate, the damage extends beyond the state that made the original choice. It affects the credibility of future promises and the calculations of governments that may be asked to surrender leverage of their own. Security assurances are therefore not decorative language. Their value depends on whether states believe that the costs of violating them will be real.

The same question of political judgement arises in the Gulf, though the circumstances are different. The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was an imperfect negotiated framework for constraining Iran’s nuclear programme. Trump withdrew the United States from it in 2018. No single agreement could have guaranteed that conflict would never occur, and no single American decision explains every later action by the governments involved. But diplomacy is not valuable only when it eliminates danger. It is valuable when it preserves channels, restraints and options that might otherwise disappear.

A government that dismantles a framework assumes a responsibility to build something more effective in its place. If it does not, the result may be a widening gap between threat and restraint. In that gap, miscalculation becomes more likely. The argument is not that every escalation can be prevented by tactful language. It is that policy should be judged by whether it reduces or multiplies the dangers a country will later have to manage.

The economic consequences of conflict expose the limits of a narrow national calculus. QatarEnergy’s chief executive told Reuters that attacks in the Gulf damaged two liquefied natural gas trains, reducing Qatar’s export capacity by 17 per cent, with repairs expected to take years. That report does not establish that any one American decision alone caused the damage. It does show how regional confrontation can impair infrastructure on which faraway economies rely. The Reuters interview was reported by DD News.

An energy shock is often described as a fluctuation in a market index. That language can obscure its human route. Higher fuel costs affect transport, fertiliser, food production and manufacturing. They narrow the choices of farmers and ranchers, raise the cost of moving goods and add pressure to households already spending heavily on necessities. The damage may be concentrated in one facility or one country; the economic burden is dispersed across people who had no say in the decisions that produced it.

That is the neglected question of leadership: who bears the external costs of a decision? A policy can look forceful from the capital where it is announced and still be reckless in its consequences. The power to act is not the same as the wisdom to anticipate how the action will travel. Responsible leadership requires more than the ability to impose a cost. It requires the discipline to count that cost before it is imposed, including costs paid by people beyond one’s own electorate.

For Ghana and its neighbours, this is a reason to think seriously about economic resilience. Gulf states whose prosperity is closely tied to energy exports have an understandable interest in diversifying their investments and building durable relationships with resource-producing countries. West Africa, including Ghana, can attract capital, technical expertise and access to markets. But describing such investment as “insurance” raises a question: insurance for whom, against what risks, and at whose expense?

Buying stakes in oil and gas companies might diversify where an investor owns assets. It cannot, by itself, protect an energy-dependent economy from global price shocks that affect the value of those same resources. Nor does an investment in fossil fuels remove the longer-term risks of climate change, technological change or a transition in global energy demand. If a Gulf partnership is to be genuine insurance, it must be broader than acquiring more of the commodity whose volatility it is meant to hedge. It should build economic connections and capabilities that remain useful as the energy system changes.

For Ghana, the central issue is not whether foreign capital is welcome. It is whether the terms convert that capital into lasting public value. Ghana’s petroleum framework treats petroleum as the property of the Republic and provides for development through agreements involving the State, the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation and contractors. The practical proposal is therefore not for a foreign government to buy Ghanaian oil. It is for investors to participate through Ghanaian agreements, under Ghanaian law and with Ghanaian institutions able to enforce the terms. The Petroleum Commission’s model agreement sets out the roles of the State and GNPC alongside contractors.

A partnership that deserves to be called “win-win” would need to make the benefits visible and enforceable: transparent contracts and revenue reporting, public scrutiny, environmental safeguards, local jobs and skills, stronger Ghanaian suppliers, and credible plans for restoring sites. It would also need to show how investment helps develop value-added activity in Ghana rather than simply moving crude and gas abroad. Without those conditions, the investor may secure the asset while Ghana remains responsible for the social and environmental costs.

The Saudi example can inform this discussion, but only if its institutions are described accurately. Saudi Aramco is a national oil company. The Public Investment Fund is a separate sovereign wealth fund that holds some Aramco shares. Aramco is not itself a production-sharing agreement, and its structure does not automatically give a sovereign wealth fund oversight of every oil well. The broader lesson is that ownership, production, public revenues and long-term investment are different parts of a national system. Policy should explain how those parts relate instead of compressing them into an attractive but imprecise analogy.

Ghana already has a Stabilisation Fund and a Heritage Fund for petroleum revenues. That is a foundation, not a guarantee. The stabilisation fund is intended to help cushion revenue shortfalls; the heritage fund is intended to support future generations after petroleum resources are depleted. Their public purpose depends on transparent rules, independent oversight and the willingness to resist short-term political pressure. A fund called “heritage” cannot protect the future if the future is repeatedly borrowed against. The Bank of Ghana describes the purposes of the Ghana Petroleum Funds.

There is also a question of time. Petroleum can provide capital, but it cannot provide an endless development strategy. Oil and gas are finite, and global efforts to reduce emissions will change their value and the markets available to producers. Ghana should therefore judge any agreement not only by its projected production or immediate revenue, but by what it leaves behind: technical capacity, trained workers, dependable infrastructure, environmental protection and financial assets that outlast extraction. A development agreement is strongest when it prepares a country for the day its central resource is no longer central.

Ukraine, Iran and Ghana are not interchangeable cases. One concerns a war of aggression and the sovereignty of a country under attack; another concerns diplomacy, regional escalation and the security of vital energy infrastructure; the third concerns how a resource-rich nation can negotiate investment without surrendering control. The connection is more fundamental than a simple analogy. In each case, the issue is agency: whether people and nations retain meaningful choices over their security and their future, or whether those choices are narrowed by decisions taken elsewhere.

Ghana cannot determine the course of every war, nor insulate itself entirely from global shocks. But it can insist that its resources be governed in the national interest and that foreign partnerships leave the country with greater capacity than it had before. That requires the confidence to welcome capital and the discipline to set terms; the foresight to earn from finite resources and the restraint to preserve some of their value for those yet to come.

The measure of strength is not how much pressure a leader can apply, or how quickly a deal can be announced. It is whether the choices made today leave others with more security, more agency and a more viable future. That is true for Ukraine negotiating under fire, for Gulf states exposed to the consequences of escalation, and for Ghana deciding how to turn its natural wealth into national capability.