By Mel Gurtov
The Trump Turnabout
Pres. Trump emerged from a much shorter meeting than expected with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage to say there was “no deal” but an “extremely productive” meeting in which “many points” were agreed to. What points?
Neither leader provided any details about the meeting, and Trump took no questions at the joint news conference with Putin. But plainly, Trump left empty-handed: “we didn’t get there,” he said. “There” should mean a cease-fire in Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, as Trump has said many times. But it is Putin who can say “we got there.”
Because Trump abandoned his previous positions, ones that the Europeans had agreed with, and accepted Putin’s desire for acquiring all of the Donbas region of Ukraine, including land Russia does not occupy. Trump agreed to jump directly to peace talks, without a cease-fire.
This extraordinary surrender to Russia’s ambitions constitutes the appeasement many observers, me included, had long feared. Gone were all the suspicions of Putin that Trump said he had (“He’s very nice to us all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless”) and all the threats of “serious consequences” if Putin did not accept a cease-fire. Putin is trustworthy again, just as he was at Helsinki in 2018 when Trump said he trusted Putin more than he trusted his own intelligence community.
We should have been prepared for this outcome to the summit. In the run-up to it, most Russia experts seemed to agree that Putin already had the upper hand:
Trump had made a serious mistake in meeting with Putin, an indicted war criminal, on US territory. The red carpet treatment for Putin sent entirely the wrong signal. As one commentator noted, Trump greeted Putin like an old friend and reliable ally.
Trump’s apparent belief that a one-on-one meeting with Putin would yield favorable results was badly mistaken. Trump is no match for Putin in any give-and-take.
Trump and Putin have completely different goals. Max Boot, Washington Post opinion writer, wrote before the Anchorage meeting: “The whole summit is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: Trump thinks Putin wants to end the war. What Putin really wants is to win the war.” If Trump’s turnabout holds, that’s exactly what Putin will get.
Putin’s Way
What was true before the Trump-Putin meeting remains true today:
Putin has often stated his ambition to subordinate and eventually take over all of Ukraine, which he regards as an illegitimate state. US policy under Trump has never taken that aim seriously. Timothy Snyder writes in his Substack column for August 14: “Putin’s utopia is one of a Ukraine with no government, with a population cowed by torture, with children stolen and brainwashed, with patriots murdered and buried in mass graves, with resources in Russian hands.”
Trump has failed to hold Russia to account for any of its actions in Ukraine. His threats of sanctions have been ignored by Russia and his appeal for a 30-day cease-fire has gone nowhere. Trump has lived up to his TACO moniker with Putin. Nor has Trump ever mentioned Russian reparations for the hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses suffered by Ukraine. Nor has he demanded Russia’s return of kidnapped Ukrainian children or an accounting for all the other war crimes committed by the Putin regime. (To the contrary, Trump has terminated efforts at the Justice Department and the State Department to collect evidence of Russian war crimes.)
Summit Disaster
Here are my conclusions about the Alaska meeting.
First, it was a disaster for Trump. He got played; his effort to flatter Putin with the location and the optics failed.
Second, Putin was given no incentive to stop his war. To the contrary, Trump gave him every incentive to keep fighting—no demands of any kind, and no leverage, such as tariffs or sanctions—to make Putin stop and think. As former secretary of state Susan Rice said on MSNBC, Trump “let Putin out of the penalty box.”
Third, Ukraine is put in a very difficult position, though it has the backing of European leaders. Trump has abandoned any US role in defense of Ukraine, leaving it to the other NATO members to provide military support.
The next Trump-Putin meeting, with Zelensky in attendance, is slated to aim at a deal over Ukraine’s territory. Trump said as much when he told Fox News Radio prior to the Alaska summit: “The second meeting is going to be very, very important because that’s going to be a meeting where they [Putin and Zelensky] make a deal. And I don’t want to use the word ‘divvy’ things up. But you know, to a certain extent, it’s not a bad term, okay?”
Imagine the scene: Trump accepts Putin’s invitation to hold the next meeting in Moscow, at which Zelensky is put in the position by Trump of either agreeing to Putin’s territorial demands or face further destruction of Ukraine. Call it another Munich or another Yalta—either way, it’s a sellout of an independent country by a US president who believes he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mel Gurtov, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University.
