The art of the deal
Who really held the cards at the Alaska summit, why are Europe's leaders at the White House today, and what does it all mean for Ukraine?
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What exactly happened between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at Friday’s abbreviated summit meeting in Anchorage, Alaska? At least, beyond what we can figure out from the documents somebody left behind on a hotel printer?
What we do know: The Russian leader and his entourage exited early; Trump confidantes were reportedly stunned by whatever was discussed in the room where it happened, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who isn’t talking much, says a peace deal is ”a long ways off.” Special U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff did announce a new commitment to “security guarantees,” but otherwise, Russia stuck to its existing demands, and even got Trump to adopt — or at least repeat — some of them. That’s far from the cease-fire Trump had said he would get, and aside from some vague promises of a continuing process, another meeting doesn’t appear to have been put on the agenda.
But the end of the war in Ukraine wasn’t likely to come out of a meeting that didn’t include Ukraine’s representatives. And given Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s USSR sweatshirt, it didn’t seem that the Russian delegation had come prepared to rethink its expansionist stance.
So what was the point, aside from handing Putin a symbolic victory and a delay on any further sanctions? Even that, Peter Baker wrote for The New York Times, came at considerable cost for the United States and its European allies.
Never before has a president invited to American soil a Russian leader who has been sanctioned by the United States government and faces an arrest warrant for war crimes issued by the International Criminal Court. Democrats contend that hosting Putin under such circumstances sends a dangerous message.
That message, in the end, was mostly a public relations score for Vladimir Putin. He got to return to the diplomatic stage on a grand scale to tell — and sell — his side of the story on Ukraine while playing to Trump’s pet peeves and conspiratorial talking points. And Putin recognized that the way to Trump’s confidence was through an appeal to his domestic anxieties — with strongmen, game recognizes game.
“I think that he respects our country now,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin during a post-summit interview on Fox News. “He didn’t respect it under Biden, I can tell you that. He had no respect for it. I was so happy when he said this would have never happened. This — all those lives would be saved if they had a competent — if we had a competent president.”
At the joint press conference, Putin spoke first, an unusual arrangement for a visiting leader, and spent the time he didn’t devote to the arcana of Russia’s justifications for the Ukraine invasion to endorsing the notions that Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine had Trump been president, and that the 2020 election had been stolen, based on his supposed mistrust of mail-in voting (which, oddly enough, Russia allows).
Back in the realm of diplomacy, one side was swayed by the meeting: Trump’s announced objective going into the meeting had been a cease-fire, and afterward, he changed his tune about the need for one on the way to a peace agreement. Ukraine, however, insists on it as a precondition for peace talks. But as Maggie Haberman wrote for the Times, going into the talks, Trump’s actual goal was something bigger and more personal, though he doesn’t seem to have gotten any closer to that:
Trump has been chasing a Nobel Peace Prize. This meeting does not appear to have been another step toward it.
Could it have gone any other way? As Anne Applebaum wrote for The Atlantic, the outcome was inevitable, given that the United States has discarded its once-strong diplomatic hand. Back in February, Trump may have accused Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky of not having the cards, but in Applebaum’s account, it’s the U.S. that’s thrown away its hand:
The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.
Since Friday, Trump has continued to insist talks move ahead without a cease-fire, and that Ukraine permanently cede Crimea and agree to never join NATO — moving the official U.S. line to mirror Putin’s positions. He said as much in a call to Zelensky and Europe’s leaders on the way home from Alaska.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who was on that call along with a group of European leaders (who’d met in advance last week to plan a unified response), rejected Putin’s ideas and Trump’s adoption of them outright. “International borders cannot be changed by force,” she said, and reiterated that Ukraine must remain a “steel porcupine” — that is, beyond rejecting Russia’s claim to territory, she signaled that the European Union is still committed to supporting Ukraine’s resistance, the plan she had proposed earlier in the year.
That means that today, Trump faces a big diplomatic challenge. Zelensky is headed to Washington Monday afternoon for a redo of his ill-fated February Oval Office visit, this time accompanied in person by the highest-ranking members of the “coalition of the willing”: a group of European leaders, including von der Leyen, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Finnish president Alexander Stubb, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and even sometime Euroskeptic Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who will arrive prepared and — at least to some extent — united.
Secretary of State Rubio is likely correct that the EU leadership isn’t coming to stop Zelensky from being bullied. They’re coming for a more serious reason — Europe’s future.
“If we are weak with Russia today, we’ll be preparing the conflicts of tomorrow and they will impact the Ukrainians and — make no mistake — they can impact us, too.” Macron said Sunday.
It’s not entirely clear how strong the European position is — von der Leyen did make a tariff deal with Trump last month — but the fact that such a high-powered delegation has planned a response and will assemble in person in support of Zelensky is something new, and suggests that what remains of the old international rules-based order recognizes that a “just and lasting peace” isn’t going to be forthcoming if the U.S. bargains alone — and that Trump’s ability to negotiate on behalf of Europe is questionable at the very least.
Meanwhile, Russian media clearly sees — or has an interest in portraying — Russia and the U.S. aligned against the rest of the world, and against Ukraine’s and Europe’s interests:
Trump, meanwhile, is reportedly mostly worried about what Zelensky might wear. And his main takeaway from Alaska, inspired by the suspicions stoked by his fellow strongman, looks to be yet another crackdown on an imagined threat: mail-in voting.
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& while Trump was "pursuing peace" with his buddy "Vlad": The MAGA response to Gov Newsom pointing out the inconvenient facts is to claim that the crime rate in dozens of red state cities is much higher than in DC is to whine. Shreveport LA so far this year is only 3x higher (down from 6x) than DC so "leave us alone". Of course some of these "law & order" red state governors are sending their guard units to DC to put down "violent felony" sandwich throwing & other crimes in DC. #Resist & #VoteBlue
Maybe I’m being paranoid but one part of Putin’s remarks after the ‘summit’ with Trump has me wondering. He stressed how Alaska was formerly part of Russia and how that heritage remains in Alaska. He feels much the same way about Ukraine. That’s not going well for Ukraine. Trump takes Canada and Greenland, Putin gets (some) of Alaska? I would not put any craziness beyond either of these two.