Let’s do our arithmetic on the sums being proposed by Witkoff and Kushner to resolve the Ukraine war and the stand-off over Greenland

I have just been in an exchange with former Assistant Treasury Secretary and professional economist Craig Roberts about a money issue: can we call what Witkoff and Kushner are penciling in as the sums of money that could end the Ukraine war or could end the stand-off over Greenland ‘cheap bribes’?

When you do the arithmetic, you have to scratch your head at the notion that Trump’s boys are barking up the wrong tree, as we say in colloquial English. Of course, I could be off by a digit given that my hand-held pre-Modern Age calculator barely functions in the realm of billions. I welcome push-back from readers.

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On the question of ‘bribes,’ meaning the proposed payments to Denmark and to Ukraine: I make the argument in an essay I published this morning that real estate developers can be better emissaries for peace negotiations than professional diplomats with law degrees who are by definition traders in abstractions, in the decades-long tradition of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. They are people who try to solve POLITICAL problems as if they were strictly legal issues like sovereignty or aggression. They are not looking for a resolution which comes from breaking eggs to make an omelet.

I think that the Danish people will be very stupid to refuse Trump’s 800 billion for Greenland – if their authoritarian Prime Minister gives them the facts and let’s them express themselves in a referendum. At present and in the foreseeable future, meaning the next 30 plus years, Greenland is a budgetary charge not a budgetary contributor. The 800 billion divided by the 6 million population of Denmark comes to 133,000 for every man, woman and child in Denmark or about 6,000 per annum per capita if invested with a return of 5% in perpetuity. This income whether annualized or taken as lump sum would make the Danes one of the most financially secure nations in Europe. How can people call this a bribe? Or if you do so, it is a helluva bribe. Let’s call it what it is: a purchase price for peace.

For the Ukrainians, a similar global sum in exchange for the Donbas territory may be less attractive on a per capita basis, but the net worth of Ukrainians today is a lot lower than the net worth of your average Dane today. The money could finally give compensation to widows and orphans. The money could rebuild most of the infrastructure and residential properties that have been destroyed in the war. It would not compensate the Ukrainians for all that they have lost, but it was their own stupidity and/or lack of courage not to overthrow the Zelensky regime long ago which makes them net losers even if they are offered and accept 700 or 800 billion.

These are not trivial issues.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026