Trump’s Alaska Summit: Folly or Triumph?
By Nicolai N. Petro
According to the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, Kaja Kallas, and former U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “Putin can end this war” anytime he wishes. To understand why the Alaska Summit is taking place now and what is likely to emerge from it, it therefore seems logical to consider Putin’s demands.
Russia’s red lines for a durable peace were communicated most succinctly on June 14, 2024. The first is that Ukraine completely withdraw its military from the Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhye—the four regions annexed by Russia in which fighting is still taking place; the second is that Ukraine officially declare that it does not intend to join NATO.
As soon as Ukraine fulfills these two conditions, Putin said, he would “immediately issue the order to cease fire and begin negotiations.” Tellingly, that same week, Russia announced that it was ready for a “comprehensive dialogue” with Washington to discuss, among other things, how America might help in the resolution of the Ukraine conflict.
This does not mean that Russia has abandoned its other concerns, such as the de-Nazification of Ukrainian society, preventing the emergence of a global hegemon, and creating a “common and indivisible Euro-Atlantic and Eurasian security community” based on the principles laid out by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE) 2010 Summit in Astana. Only that Russia now regards these priorities as secondary to the resolution of the military conflict in Ukraine.
So why meet now? What has changed since June 2024? Simply put, recent Russian military successes, combined with the West’s failure to provide any prospect of a Ukrainian victory, have made Kiev’s defeat inevitable.
This sense of inevitability has recently been reinforced by the uncompromising response of the BRICS states—shrugging off Washington’s threat of third-party sanctions (or tariffs) on countries that continue to do business with Russia. Donald Trump’s advisors, meanwhile, likely explained to him that, in this tug-of-war, the United States was likely to suffer much more than it would gain over a conflict that was peripheral to U.S. national interests. This includes not just the risk of a more unified BRICS, but also the strong likelihood that even more of the Global South would want to join BRICS, seeing in it the foundation for a more stable and sustainable rules-based order than the one currently led by the West.
On the battlefield, Russia’s steady advances now risk overwhelming Ukraine’s eroding defenses. Since the West lacks the military, technological, or economic resources—not to mention the political will—to reverse this trajectory in the foreseeable future, Trump likely sent his trusted envoy Steve Wikoff to Moscow to see if Putin would still accept a ceasefire along the lines of what he proposed on June 14, 2024.
It appears Putin is willing to entertain a similar proposal, and this has sufficed for a meeting.
Winners and Losers
While it is unlikely that any major breakthroughs will be achieved at such a hastily convened meeting, the mere fact of it happening is leading to speculation about the winners and losers of an eventual settlement. Given the current course of the war, most observers agree that Russia and its BRICS allies have the upper hand over Ukraine and its EU allies, and Moscow wants to lock in its military victories into permanent diplomatic gains.
If a deal is concluded, America will also be able to claim at least a partial victory. Washington will finally be able to cut its losses in Ukraine, while Trump can deliver on a campaign promise to end the war, in addition to getting the EU to not only fund the war effort but also purchase American military equipment to do so! Meanwhile, the war has thoroughly vassalized Europe, and new fault lines are fracturing the political West: as the EU economies remain saddled with self-imposed restrictions on trade and energy purchases from Russia, Trump is considering ways to improve bilateral “strategic cooperation” with Russia, possibly even including energy investments.
The dramatic difference between the American and European approaches boils down to Brussels being willing to gamble all on the pursuit of victory in Ukraine, often putting European politics above real-world strategy. The EU’s hubris and ideological fixation on defeating Russia have led to unprecedented levels of support for Ukraine, without ever considering what to do if Russia is not defeated.
Now that the United States is no longer willing to support such a course, the absence of any European strategy for ending the war, along with the economic toll that the war’s funding is inflicting on social services in many countries, has led to the rise of a populist backlash that threatens to unseat several established European political parties.
“Nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine?”
Regardless of whether or not a deal is signed at this meeting, it has already had one salubrious effect: it has revealed the emptiness of the slogan “Nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine”. It sounds appealing, but in international politics, more often than not, the opposite holds true—victors dictate terms to the defeated, with little to no regard for what the latter want.
It has often been said, though rarely by Russian spokesmen, that the war in Ukraine cannot be won on the battlefield. This is simply not true. It can be won on the battlefield, albeit at great cost. Even more importantly, developments on the battlefield always shape the political settlement.
It was obvious from the beginning that the disparity in military, economic, and demographic potentials did not favor Ukraine in its conflict with Russia. Structurally speaking, Russia is a historical middle power and a civilizational state; Ukraine is a relatively small, peripheral, and fault-line state established in 1991. Ukraine’s Western supporters, however, argued that the imbalance could be offset by Western sanctions, which would cripple the Russian economy and its military production, and by bold offensives, like the invasion of the Kursk region and the “Spiderweb” operation. In combination, it was claimed, they would sap public support and lead the Russian political leadership to reconsider its strategy in Ukraine.
Instead, in response to sanctions, Russia developed alternative payment mechanisms, new supply chains, and alternative markets that have allowed its economy to grow to the world’s fourth-largest economy since the war began. The recurring strikes inside Russian territory, meanwhile, have not had any impact on the Russian public’s support for Putin. Indeed, they have had a predictable rallying effect, consolidating public perceptions that this war is necessary and justified.
As a result, over time, the disparity between the two countries has only increased. This has led to truly catastrophic levels of desertions among Ukrainian soldiers (Ukrainian parliamentarians have cited figures as high as 400,000 AWOL), and to a dramatic shift in Ukrainian public opinion—69% now want peace negotiations, compared to 24% who are still willing to continue fighting, according to the latest Gallup poll—a net reversal from three years ago.
The Summit’s Objective: A Blueprint for the Future?
We should not expect a detailed, comprehensive peace deal for Ukraine from this U.S.-Russia summit. It would already be quite a feat if the two presidents signed a document that laid out, in broad strokes, a common vision for the future. Such a document would focus primarily on Russian-American relations, with a codicil, at best, about the steps to be taken to resolve the conflict in Ukraine.
The obvious model here is the “Basic Principles Agreement” signed in Moscow in May 1972. While not a détente per se, it served as the precursor to détente, and to the Helsinki Peace Conference of 1975, which subsequently codified these bilateral principles for all of Europe. A similarly long and laborious process of rapprochement will be needed to reconcile Russia with the global West today.
However, by at least beginning to establish a normal diplomatic framework within which to discuss U.S.-Russia relations, the United States could finally situate the conflict in Ukraine in its proper context. Ukraine, for obvious reasons, wants its interests to be the focal point of U.S.-Russia relations, and even to drag Washington and NATO into a direct confrontation with Moscow. But a global power like the United States has other priorities and competing interests, some of which require Russia’s cooperation.
The Biden Administration purposefully cultivated public confusion (“strategic ambiguity”) over Ukraine’s importance to America’s national interests, partly to cajole its allies and partly to pressure Russia. This has caused a host of problems: first, it misled Ukrainian leaders into believing that America would eventually enter the war directly on their side, encouraging their reluctance to negotiate a settlement; relatedly, it led NATO to overcommit and exhaust its own military resources, while rejecting any settlement that was not on Ukraine’s terms. This is why a preliminary peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, initialed by both sides in Istanbul in April 2022, was scuttled.
Some will object that any agreement now smacks of “appeasement” and “another Yalta”. To them, one should simply point out that the Yalta Agreement created the postwar world order in which the United States became a superpower, the European Union was formed, and global nuclear war was prevented. Those interested in a more balanced view of Yalta should take a look at Irish diplomatic historian Geoffrey Roberts’ prescient 2018 essay, “Trump Wants to Restore the U.S.-Russia Alliance”.
Alaska’s Motto: “North to the Future”
The choice of Alaska, once the easternmost part of the Russian Empire, as a venue for this summit is deeply symbolic. The sale of Alaska in 1867 represents an important milestone in Russian-American relations.
By giving up its huge territory in North America, Russia turned away from the overseas colonial ambitions that would plague so many other European dynasties during the latter half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, instead choosing to become a good neighbor to the United States, while at the same time relying on it as a buffer against further British imperial expansion.
At the time, few in either Russia or America understood the benefits of this, and the sale was ridiculed in the American press as “Seward’s Folly”. In retrospect, history has proved them all wrong.
If we are overly fortunate, perhaps this summit will someday also be seen as a new turning point in our relations with Russia and the beginning of a more hopeful future.