The big question on the mind of geopolitical experts in anticipation of Friday’s pre-baked Alaska summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump: Whether Trump will once again be a sniveling suck up in Putin’s presence, or whether he will be somewhat less of a sniveling suck up.
Despite what you might read elsewhere, there is absolutely no chance that Trump actually stands up to Putin or displays anything much other than the curtsying servility that is his signature move in the presence of the Russian dictator.
Combine that fact with the absence of Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky from the meeting and it is pretty clear that there will be no real breakthrough for peace or an end to Russian aggression against its brave neighbor.
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In other words, the meeting’s outcomes are very limited. One possibility, the best-case scenario from Trump’s perspective, is that it tees up another get-together, perhaps this time one that actually involves Zelensky. In my view, announcing that they are working toward such a goal—even in vague terms—is what is most likely. This would allow Trump to save face, even to present himself as the Nobel-worthy peacemaker he is currently cosplaying as. (It’s hard to be considered a genuine candidate for the Nobel Prize, however, when you actively support genocide in Gaza, launch attacks on Iran, turn troops against those seeking refuge in your country and cut U.S. support for the battered people of Ukraine.)
This outcome is the one that Zelensky and Europe are also banking on. The Ukrainian leader and those from top European countries got together Wednesday to establish their five principles on which any deal must be based. They also spoke to Trump in a conversation all described as productive. Their primary message was that there be adequate security protections for Ukraine in any deal and, per Zelensky, that Russia not be allowed to veto Ukraine having a relationship with NATO, but it was just as clear that the purpose of their discussions was to send Trump a message that the Europeans are aligned with Ukraine and would resist being bullied into a private deal struck between the U.S. and Russia.
Whether Putin will go along with any of that is another matter—he has shown no inclination to be flexible thus far. As a result, the summit could end with little more than a little pouting from Trump that he is “disappointed” by Putin’s intransigence. Who would ever expect a war criminal who has broken every agreement he has entered into to be hard to deal with?
That is as tough as Trump is likely to get in the presence of a guy he admires, who has helped him get elected, who he might need in the future and, who knows, may possess some information about him that he would rather not have made public.
In this instance, will Trump storm out and announce real penalties with teeth on Russia—the transfer of Russian assets currently held by the U.S. to Ukraine; the imposition of secondary sanctions on Russia’s number one customer for its oil, China? Sure, he has tried to portray himself as being willing to stand up to Putin, and even some commentators have bought this charade. But there is no real evidence to support it.
In fact, the primary evidence—that he has not shifted his long-held pro-Russian stance—is that he has not imposed any real sanctions despite six months of Russia ignoring his pleas for peace and pounding Ukraine mercilessly. Trump has, meanwhile, cut U.S. support for Ukraine dramatically and shows no sign of reversing that stance. (Indeed, Trump’s entire “I can solve this war in 24 hours” campaign was based on his idea that he could squeeze Ukraine by stopping U.S. support, and that they would have to settle on Russian terms.) And he appears to have completely internalized his long-repeated lies and misstatements about the conflict; that both sides are equally responsible for the war and that many of the people of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine are really Russian and want to be Russian.
Trump often peddles the idea that Russia would never have started the war were he in the White House. The problem with this is that Russia started the war with its invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Hostilities raged throughout Trump’s last presidency and he did very little to stop it.
Does that sound like an honest broker or credible peacemaker to you?
Finally, of course, the terms that Trump seems to be most comfortable with for settling the war are, more or less, the ones Putin has dictated: Russia will get to keep most of the land it has illegally seized. Ukraine will not be allowed to join NATO. Ukraine will not be allowed to develop robust military defenses. And any other big issues to be resolved will be punted far off into the future.
Not only are these terms unacceptable to Ukraine, they are neither in the interest of the European Union or the U.S. They create a circumstance (and set a precedent) in which Russia’s aggression has been rewarded and its threats to its neighbors in the West will be greater not less.
The White House is already trying to lower expectations for the summit because they too realize real progress toward peace is likely to remain elusive. A ceasefire is the likely best outcome—this works just fine for Putin, whose army is battered and who has big economic problems at home he wants to get to. More than that? Unlikely.
Which suggests that absent something really ugly happening —say, Trump’s fawning publicly on Putin as he did in Helsinki in 2018—at the summit, it is likely to produce very little progress or evidence that Trump’s position has much changed or that the U.S. really has any leverage it is inclined to use to force a shift in the Russian position.
In other words, while the event will be interesting to watch because who doesn’t love a bromance we can pretty well predict the outcomes now because they have been pre-baked into the more or less unchanging and seemingly unchangeable positions of Trump and his political Daddy.
