Speculation swirls around the US-Russia meeting in Anchorage planned for Friday. Will Ukraine be at the table, or on the menu? What leverage (if any) will the US apply to Russia to extract concessions and reward compliance? Will the Europeans’ belated, frantic efforts to get their point of view across bear fruit? Anything could happen, from a walkout to a sellout.
But the winners and losers are already clear. First and foremost, the Chinese Communist Party: not invited, but on everyone’s mind. Decision-makers in Beijing did not like Russia’s reckless illegal war, but they liked even less the idea of it losing. So the CCP helped the Putin regime keep fighting. It also kept the brakes on his nuclear sabre-rattling. The CCP has not only established unshakeable dominance in the Sino-Russian relationship. China is now a power-broker across the Eurasian landmass in a way that would have been unimaginable only 10 years ago: a foretaste of the influence the CCP will exercise on other continents too.
Second, the Kremlin’s decade-old pariah status is over. Far from being arrested for child abduction and other crimes arising from his murderous war on Ukraine, the Russian leader will be treated as a VIP when he lands on American soil. We are almost back to the era of the “reset”, when President Barack Obama took the supposedly liberal new Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, to his favourite cheeseburger joint.
All Western countries are less safe now. The multilateral organisations that supposedly guarantee their security have been shown to be toothless irrelevancies. Clearly, only big states matter (along with a handful of exceptionally able Trump-whisperers, such as Finland’s president Alexander Stubb). Why should anyone take the European Union seriously? Or for that matter, NATO? Ukraine may escape formal dismemberment at the summit, but the fact that “land swaps” of occupied for unoccupied territory are even talked about highlights the failure of those self-important institutions in their gleaming Brussels headquarters.
Another big loser is international law, and particularly the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 was meant to mark a big step towards ridding the world of nuclear weapons. The failure of the US, Britain, France, and China to hold Russia to account for breaching it makes the deal worse than useless. Why would any country now agree to give up nuclear weapons in exchange for promises? Why would any country that fears nuclear blackmail hesitate to get these weapons for itself? This is no way to mark the 80th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What remains is detail. How will the fighting end, and where, and with what monitoring, enforcement, or guarantees? We may not find that out in Alaska this week, but we should already be asking much bigger questions. Where and when will war start again? And what will we do about it?
The West had many chances, dating from the early 1990s, to stand up to Russia all at times when transatlantic unity was far stronger than now. We failed. Not because anyone made us fail, but because we got bored, tired, and scared. We had the chance to stand up to Russia with a strong, united Ukraine on our side. We failed that, too. We were not willing to give Ukrainians the weapons and the money they needed when they had a chance of winning, and to take the risk of a defeated Russia collapsing or lashing out. First, the threat was too indistinct and distant. Then it was too grave. Western political decision-making was divided and self-indulgent.
European leaders may not like President Trump’s latest intervention. But where was theirs?