A Symposium: The Alaska Summit
The Realist Review and The American Committee for US-Russia Accord has gathered top experts on US-Russia relations and international and diplomatic affairs to share their thoughts on the Alaska Summit this past Friday.
Below are contributions* from Ted Snider, Richard Sakwa,, Nicolai Petro, Christopher Mott, Anatol Lieven, Paul Grenier, and James W. Carden.
***
The war is now going disastrously for Ukraine. The Russian armed forces have breached their defensive lines, partially encircled key logistical hubs and nearly cut off Ukraine’s forces in the east from their supplies. The Ukrainian armed forces face the threat of collapse and of Russia occupying all the Donbas. The Donbas will likely fall in months, and maybe weeks. Putin told Trump that his forces can now capture all of Donbas when they want to.
For those who want a diplomatic solution rather than a military solution that will provide the same terms at a significantly greater cost of Ukrainian lives, the summit seems to offer some hope.
Going into the summit, Trump offered two metrics for measuring success: one before and one after. Trump said he knew how it would go in the first minutes when he looked Putin in the eye. After looking him in the eye, Trump laughed, warmly shook Putin’s hand and invited him to ride to the summit in his presidential limousine. Trump then said that if the summit went well, he would talk to the press with Putin; if it went badly, he would address them alone. They spoke together. Trump said if it wasn’t a success, there would be severe consequences for Russia. After the summit, he said that oil sanctions were off for now.
Though it is not yet known what was said, Putin said they had reached an understanding that he hoped the agreement they have reached could help them get closer to peace. Trump said the meeting was “extremely productive” and that “many points were agreed upon with only a very few left unresolved.” He said, though one was significant, there was “a very good chance of getting there.”
It seems that some sort of framework agreement may be close and that Trump and Putin may meet again. Trump came out of the summit saying that the best path to peace is “to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement” and that now “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”
Hopefully, they can get it done.
Ted Snider is a foreign policy analyst and columnist at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute and a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative.
***
The Political West is facing the greatest challenge to its existence since its creation during the Cold War. The Trump phenomenon represents four potential defections: from the Atlantic alliance system; from the UN-based Charter International System; from the letter and spirit of the US Constitution; and finally, from the hallowed traditions of US governance, described by Steve Bannon as the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. Other potential defections include from the liberal economic order through the weaponization of tariff policy.
The most disturbing aspect of these multiple defections is the weakness of the intellectual and political response from within the Political West. The greatest resistance comes from outside, the nascent Political East and the Global South. A post-Western global alignment is emerging in defense of the Charter values that the West itself is repudiating.
In this context, the rapprochement between Russia and the US signaled in Alaska on 15 August represents a reversion to traditional forms of great power comity, of the Yalta- Potsdam sort that Moscow has always considered the most appropriate form to manage European, and indeed global, security issues. This has thrown the defenders of the old-style Political West into a panic, including even the threat of going it alone if the US takes the threat of the various defections to their logical confusion. While the Trumpian US is moving towards the reassertion of the national interest as the cardinal value, the legacy European powers continue to live in the double standard world of militarized liberal globalism.
Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Kent. His latest book is The Culture of the Second Cold War.
***
The Alaska Summit was an undoubted success. As proof, I submit that Putin repeated several times during his press conference that he and Trump had a relationship of trust or confidence (doverotel’nye otnosheniya).
While Trump instead used the term “productive,” it is nonetheless clear that this meeting has rekindled the personal chemistry the two leaders once shared. It is interesting to note that the Russiagate scandal, which was designed to deepen the rift between them, has instead reinforced their bond.
In his own remarks Trump alluded to certain “agreements,” though we do not yet know what these are. Still, it is obvious that significant progress toward a settlement of the war was made, because President Zelensky is flying to Washington to meet personally with President Trump as soon as possible. I would not be surprised if, on the heels of this meeting, a three way summit meeting of Presidents Zelensky, Trump and Putin is announced.
It is tempting to dismiss the EU as a useless appendage to these talks, but this would be a mistake. The security interests of Ukraine and Russia are interlinked not only with each other, but with Europe as a whole, and it is imperative that European elites understand this. If these interests can be linked together in a pan-European security framework, then territorial disputes will eventually resolve themselves, just as they did in post-war Europe.
Another way to think of it is this: Russia must again become a part of Europe, so that Ukraine can become a part of Europe.
Nicolai N. Petro is professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island and a Sr. Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. His latest book is The Tragedy of Ukraine.
***
Trump’s mercurial nature and Putin’s growing battlefield advantage leave me extremely skeptical that a positive and lasting outcome will come from this first meeting. That being said, I am glad the two foremost nuclear powers are talking directly again. Whether my skepticism is hopefully proven wrong or not, one thing I can predict with certainty is that the majority of the press will have a meltdown.
Unipolarity has spoiled the average foreign affairs journalist, who seems to believe that diplomacy is something that only exists between friends, rather than a difficult process most relevant for adversaries. I recommend mandatory screenings of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country for a valuable and press-accessible way of exploring the inherent nobility of trying to reduce great power tensions, as well as the dangers of the many saboteurs in multiple countries whose vested interests lead them to sabotage such actions.
One can only hope that greater prospects of peace in Europe could lead to greater prospects of peace in the Middle East too. If Putin could come to America, so can Trump, perhaps with Putin’s help, go to Iran. To quote Spock in the aforementioned movie, “There is an old Vulcan proverb; only Nixon could go to China.”
Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy who focuses on neoclassical realist grand strategy and historical geopolitics.
***
Most of the Western commentary on the Alaska summit is criticizing President Trump for precisely the wrong reason. The accusation is that by abandoning his call for an unconditional ceasefire as the first step in peace talks, Trump has surrendered a key position and “aligned himself with Putin.”
This is nonsense. What Trump has done is to align himself with reality, and the real charge against him is that he should probably have done this from the start, and saved six months of fruitless negotiations and thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Moreover, by continually emphasising a prior ceasefire as his key goal, Trump set himself up for precisely the kind of criticism that he is now receiving.
Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. For the remainder of Dr. Lieven’s analysis, see: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-ukraine-russia-agreement/
***
In his online reaction to the Anchorage summit, Zelensky’s former media advisor Oleksii Arestovich stated that he was positively impressed, among much else, by Putin’s declaration that Ukrainians “are a fraternal people” and that what is happening in Ukraine “is a tragedy for us” (i.e., for all Russians). Putin also made a series of impressive gestures emphasizing his Christian faith, Arestovich noted.
In this same social media post, Arestovich lamented the decadence of global mass media, which offer a constant flow of “hype … disparagement and ridicule” while eschewing any sober assessment of what has actually happened.
The resulting denial of reality by what Arestovich terms the “emo crowd” with its “pink-colored bangs” is now our greatest danger. “The global USAID turned out to be a lot more global than it seemed, and it now sits in the brains of millions,” Arestovich concluded.
My own non-systematic review of the response to Anchorage tends to confirm Arestovich’s conclusion. The New York Times, for example, wrote that “Mr. Putin offered a cease-fire in the rest of Ukraine at current battle lines and a written promise not to attack Ukraine or any European country again.” The paper of record then adds that Putin “has broken similar promises before” without bothering to explain on which other occasions Putin’s promise not to attack Europe has been broken “before.” Nor did the journalists at the Times volunteer (by way of balance?) any examples of the U.S. having violated ‘similar promises.’
A European friend, in a post to social media, scolded Trump for having acted so chummy with Vladimir Putin, “a war criminal.” Which actions by Putin qualify him as being a war criminal were not specified and possible war crimes committed by Putin’s enemies were likewise not mentioned.
The British-Canadian international affairs scholar Paul Robinson wrote recently that the biggest obstacle to achieving peace with Russia will continue to be the many “spoilers” dead set against any such thing. At the vanguard of such ‘spoilers,’ it can be inferred from a brilliant essay by Valerie Stivers, will continue to stand, as they have stood now for more than a decade, liberal
Americans with their “self-righteous belief in a fight for freedom and democracy, based on an enmity they only half-understand …”
Paul R. Grenier is the president and founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy
***
Even if the deliverables from the Alaska talks were slight, Trump and Putin seem to understand better than most the wisdom of Harold Macmillan’s comment (often attributed to Churchill) that “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Putin’s preference to “jaw to jaw” with his Ukrainian and European counterparts over the course of the six years of the Minsk Process backfired badly on him—those six years were used not to come to a peaceful settlement but to buy the Ukrainian armed forces time (as Angela Merkel admitted in her memoirs), and to integrate them under the EuroAtlantic security umbrella. Former President Joe Biden refused to negotiate with Putin before the war and then refused to do so for the remainder of his term. So a face-to-face in Alaska seems a step in the right direction. Trump’s task now is to persuade Zelensky and his EuroEnablers such as Merz and Macron and Starmer that their demand for a ceasefire prior to negotiations is a non-starter.
Putin was fooled once by the Europeans (via the Minsk process), he won’t get fooled again.
James W. Carden is senior adviser to ACURA and a former adviser to the Special Representative for Intergovernmental Affairs at the State Department.
*Contributors are listed in descending alphabetical order.