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| Activists wearing masks of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin hold a map of Ukraine during a pro-Ukraine protest in Berlin, on Aug. 14. (Filip Singer/EPA/Shutterstock) |
| Ukraine’s president was blunt about Friday’s summit in Alaska. President Donald Trump was set to host Russian President Vladimir Putin for talks on the future of the war in Ukraine — but without Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose country has weathered three-and-a-half years of Russian invasion and attacks. The latter sensed he would be a bystander amid discussions over the fate of his nation. “I believe that Putin will benefit from this, because what he is seeking, frankly, is photographs. He needs a photo from a meeting with President Trump,” Zelensky told reporters Tuesday in Kyiv before itemizing his concerns, which include Trump relaxing threats of imminent new penalties on Moscow: “First, he will be meeting on U.S. soil, which I believe is his personal victory,” Zelensky said. “Second, he is coming out of isolation because he is meeting on U.S. soil. Third, with this meeting, he has somehow postponed the sanctions policy. President Trump has serious sanctions, and we are very much looking forward to these sanctions.” On Thursday, Trump said there was still a possibility that Zelensky could join the proceedings, slated to be held in a military base in Anchorage, and shifted focus to a future “second” meeting that would involve all three. Though Trump wants to emerge from discussions touting a deal, he suggested that chances of failure Friday were at 25 percent. White House officials this week tried to lower expectations for the meeting, casting it as a “listening exercise.” In Europe, officials supportive of Ukraine’s cause have objected to any understanding between Trump and Putin that would compel Ukraine to surrender territorial claims for a truce; in their view, a ceasefire must precede negotiations. While U.S. officials are aware of European and Ukrainian concerns, Trump himself is a source of uncertainty. He has pursued two distinct approaches in foreign policy during his second term: On one hand, he’s keen to bill himself as a conciliating, peace-forging mediator; on the other, he’s shown a repeated desire to bully and coerce even close U.S. allies into concessions over trade and other issues. “It’s clear that there are sort of discrepancies,” a E.U. official told my colleague Ellen Francis, referring to internal U.S. acceptance of European red lines regarding Ukraine, “and as we’ve seen it in the U.S. system by now, you have one man who will decide.”
From Moscow’s perspective, Trump’s invitation is a boost. “The optics of the Alaska meeting reinforce Putin’s long-held goal of rebuilding Russia as one of a handful of major global powers with rightful spheres of influence, and it delivers on his short-term tactical objective of a one-on-one meeting to woo and manipulate Trump,” my colleagues reported. Former senior Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev, who resigned over the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, told The Washington Post that it was a bad idea for Trump to host Putin, especially at a moment when it’s abundantly clear that Putin seeks Ukraine’s surrender of a huge swath of its territory as a prerequisite of any settlement. In a recent interview, Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, said Trump was “way too eager for a deal,” an eagerness that “gives Putin a lot of advantages going into the meeting.” Better, McFaul suggested, that Trump first institute targeted penalties to build leverage over the Kremlin, as Russian forces gain ground within Ukraine. It’s not just Russia that may benefit from Trump’s scattershot approach to diplomacy. As Trump meets Putin, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to go later this month to China for the first time in over seven years. The visit can be inferred as a direct response to Trump’s imposition of stiff tariffs on Indian exports to the United States, a move that threatens to undermine years of careful alliance-building between Washington and New Delhi. My colleague Pranshu Verma reports from New Delhi that part of the reason for the implosion in ties may be India’s unwillingness to go along with Trump’s insistence that he is to thank for a ceasefire that ended a dramatic, if brief, shooting war between India and Pakistan (a claim Indian officials reject, but Pakistan’s army chief has embraced, much to Trump’s delight). Trump is fixated on accumulating evidence that he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, and even recently called up the finance minister of Norway, where the committee that adjudicate the prize sits, to say he wanted the award. Many U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle see India as an important bulwark against China’s rise, but Trump’s targeting of India has stoked a considerable anti-American backlash in India’s voluble domestic media. “Trump’s gamble may wring out trade concessions in the short term, but it risks undermining the security architecture in the Indo-Pacific, where unity among key democracies is the only real check on China’s expansionism,” wrote Brahma Chellaney, a hawkish Indian commentator. “America is effectively handing China an opening to court a disillusioned India.” | ||||||||||||||
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| Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping attend the BRICS summit meeting in Johannesburg, in 2018. (Mike Hutchings/Reuters) |
| More broadly, China’s global standing has improved during Trump’s second term. Earlier this summer, the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, outlined what it branded as six “global swing states” that “will exert disproportionate influence” over a fragmenting and increasingly contested international order. Those are Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey. It is key, CNAS argued, that the United States court all six in its complicated contest with China. But Trump has already alienated and lashed out at Brazil and South Africa over trade and political disagreements, spats that have seen the revival of momentum around the BRICS grouping that Trump also reviles. Polling in May showed that China was more popular than the United States among the public in four “global swing state” countries, all but Brazil and India, which at the time had yet to feel the blow of Trump’s trade war. A separate Pew poll in July found favorable opinions of China significantly spiking across 24 high-income countries around the world. And a new Gallup poll in Canada this week found that the U.S.’s neighbors hold a more favorable view of China’s leadership than the dispensation in place south of the border. Trump’s “America First” proponents may not mind a blow in international perception as the U.S. pursues a more narrow agenda abroad. But analysts argue the backlash may soon come home. “The usual analogy is the schoolyard bully. And the question is, how do you deal with a schoolyard bully?” Dani Rodrik, a leading Harvard economist, said in an interview with Foreign Policy. “Trump is swinging wildly and hitting himself more often than hitting somebody else. His policies are self-defeating. He believes he is benefiting the U.S. at the expense of the rest of the world, but he’s hitting the U.S. economy as well. We’ll see this in the coming months in inflation, in the stock market, in economic stagnation. Nothing good will come out of this for the U.S. economy.” | ||||||