President Donald Trump meets with Russia's President Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on Aug. 15.Julia Demaree Nikhinson/The Associated Press
Going into the “Fiasca in Alaska” – more formally known as the Trump-Putin summit – the only question was how much worse it would be than expected. You knew it would be bad, but you also knew that you had no idea how bad, and that whatever attempts you might make to guess how bad would inevitably fall short of the reality. As I’ve written before, Donald Trump always defeats the imagination.
The event seemed destined not to disappoint. The very act of meeting, on American soil, with a mass-murdering, child-abducting war criminal, in the flagrante delicto of his campaign of extermination in Ukraine, was an obscenity in itself. Coupled with the fawning displays of welcome – the jets flying overhead, the soldiers stooping to unroll the red carpet, the President of the United States quivering with excitement as he waited for him, the smiles, the handshakes, the intimate car ride for two – one had every reason to expect the worst, or rather to expect how much worse it would be than one had expected.
So when the two men emerged from their confab, Mr. Putin smiling coyly, Mr. Trump looking haggard, only to announce that they had been unable to reach an agreement, one felt a little surge of an unfamiliar emotion: hope. Perhaps in the end the meeting would prove to have been merely an embarrassment and a disgrace, rather than a full-on, geopolitical disaster. Maybe Mr. Trump had offered Mr. Putin the moon and the stars, but had run up against Mr. Putin’s demands for the moon, the stars and the keys to Fort Knox. Maybe the world might yet be saved by Mr. Putin’s overweening intransigence.
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How naive we were. Before a day had passed it emerged, via the inevitable background briefings and Trumpian social media posts, that the two men had in fact agreed on a great many things. Mr. Trump had gone into the meeting, in a rare display of baseline sentience, demanding a ceasefire in Ukraine and threatening sanctions and other “severe consequences” if Mr. Putin did not comply; coming out of the meeting not only was there no mention of sanctions, but Mr. Trump had miraculously converted to Mr. Putin’s view.
Mr. Putin, indeed, had not given an inch on anything: not an inch on the question of territory (the Russian idea of “land swaps” is for it to keep all the Ukrainian land it now controls, in exchange for keeping some of the land it does not); not an inch on the “root causes” of the conflict (the independence of Ukraine, in a nutshell); not an inch on “security guarantees” for Ukraine (Russia proposes that it might agree to provide such guarantees, so long as it had a veto on anyone else doing so) or NATO membership or the rest.
The only reason anyone had even briefly imagined he might have is because Mr. Trump’s chief negotiator, a bottomlessly ignorant real estate tycoon like himself by the name of Steve Witkoff, in the hurried talks leading up to the summit, had misunderstood Mr. Putin on a couple of points, believing him to have offered to withdraw from certain territories, for example, when in fact he had proposed that Ukraine should. (Mr. Witkoff’s confusion is perhaps understandable, as he has been using a translator provided by Mr. Putin.)
Which would be depressing enough, without Mr. Trump, in his public statements post-summit and in telephone calls with European leaders, taking the Putin line on every point. Well, Mr. Trump has always taken the Putin line, but there had been that brief interval, in those halcyon days before the summit, when it seemed that Mr. Trump had had certain glimmerings that perhaps Mr. Putin was not being entirely straight with him.
But there he was now, assuring his listeners that Mr. Putin wants peace, that all he wanted was a little more land – for what is Russia short of but land – in exchange for which he was prepared to guarantee that he would not take any more. Why, he was even willing to pass a law to that effect! No, the only obstacle to peace was that impossible man, Volodymyr Zelensky, who had had the temerity to “start a war” (Ukraine did not start the war) with a country “10 times its size” (Russia’s population is about three-and-a-half times Ukraine’s).
With a summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky scheduled for the following days, there was the alarming prospect of a Russo-American axis forming, issuing a series of impossible demands to which an isolated Mr. Zelensky would be forced to accede, or be blamed for the war’s continuance. Mr. Trump seemed obsessed with the idea that a peace agreement, on whatever terms, would win him the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour that has so transfixed him he was reported to have called up the Norwegian Finance Minister, out of the blue, to sound him out on his chances.
Hence the week’s second great fiasco: the panicky roundup of European leaders, as the realization sunk in of just how badly things had gone in Alaska, to accompany Mr. Zelensky to his meeting with Mr. Trump – a scene that would be written out of an opera bouffe as too implausible.
Indeed, there has never been anything like it, I’d wager, in the history of the world. Understand what was involved. The heads of government of five European nations, plus the Secretary-General of NATO and the President of the European Commission, felt it imperative to jump on a plane on a moment’s notice and cross the ocean in a desperate bid to prevent the President of the United States from doing something insane – like combining forces with Russia against Ukraine – that might not only consign Ukraine to the eternal hell of Russian occupation but plunge the rest of the continent into a war with Russia of its own. It wasn’t a summit. It was an intervention. An emergency intervention, complete with hand puppets and psychotropic drugs.
I exaggerate, but only slightly. Consider what could have put the Europeans in such an agitated state. There are three possible explanations for Mr. Trump’s seeming capture by Mr. Putin. The first is that he has simply been rolled by him, over and over – whether because he has some sort of inexplicable man-crush on him, or because of Mr. Putin’s adroit application of flattery to the suppurating wounds of Mr. Trump’s ego, or because of Mr. Trump’s peculiar susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left “when you think about it, the West are really the bad guys” arguments favoured by your stoner roommate in first year. Most people grow out of this sort of thing, aside from a few foreign-policy “realists” and the affectedly contrarian; for Mr. Trump, who has never read anything, it is all new.
The second is that Mr. Putin has something on him. This is no less alarming, and no less plausible. Mr. Trump’s long and intimate friendship with Jeffrey Epstein is by now a matter of public record; the contents of the Epstein files are not, but if anyone has had access to them it is a safe bet it is the Russians. It would take a lot to shame a six-times-bankrupt convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, self-admitted serial sexual predator, but apparently pedophilia – or whatever else Mr. Trump seems so desperate to hide – may finally be the line.
The third, perhaps simplest explanation is that Mr. Trump just happens to agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one. Mr. Putin’s theory of foreign relations is that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” That is Mr. Trump’s theory of everything.
All of these are plausible. Any one of them, if true, would threaten disaster. And it has to be one of them. Whatever may explain Mr. Trump’s behaviour, however he may be described – a malignant Chance the Gardener, a cretinous Manchurian candidate, with the intellectual and emotional responses of a child and the appetites and morality of a gangster – the leadership of much of the democratic world felt compelled to rush en masse to the White House in to deprogram him, or at least to distract him.
Hence that bizarre public performance, until now restricted to Mr. Trump’s cabinet meetings, in which the participants competed to flatter Mr. Trump in the most flowery terms. I can’t imagine any of them enjoyed it, but if that’s what it takes to keep him away from the cutlery so be it.
So: immediate disaster averted. But that hardly means the emergency has passed – not so long as Mr. Trump is on the scene. Because Mr. Trump is the emergency. Everything else about the war is mired in stasis. The wild card is Mr. Trump.
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Mr. Putin has been admirably consistent. He is not going to “stop the killing.” Killing is the business of war, and Mr. Putin is not going to stop the war until, as Garry Kasparov says, he is stopped.
He is not going to meet with Mr. Zelensky: that would be to grant him the sort of legitimacy that Mr. Trump granted Mr. Putin, something his conscience, unlike Mr. Trump’s, would not permit. The suggestion, coming out of the Kremlin, that they meet in Moscow must be viewed in that light.
He is not going to sign on to any sort of meaningful security guarantee. Not that he has been presented with one. The idea, popular in certain quarters, of an “Article V-like” guarantee only invites the question: if you are really prepared to offer Ukraine a guarantee equivalent to that provided in the NATO charter, why not just let it join NATO? From which Mr. Putin can draw the appropriate conclusions.
And so we come to the question of territory. It is the fashion to say, almost as an afterthought, that of course Ukraine will have to give up territory in any peace agreement. Not the territory it now controls, perhaps, but at least the territory Russia, by virtue of its illegal war of conquest, has taken from it. Or as the Trumpian ambassador to NATO put it, the territory it has “earned.”
Even people who profess to despise Mr. Trump will say this sort of thing. It is intended, I think, to convey a pragmatic sense of the possible, a determination to see the world as it is and not as we would wish it to be. But of course it is every bit the fantasy it supposes the alternative to be.
Leave aside the consequences for the inhabitants of the “land” so blithely transferred – consequences not imagined or predicted but experienced under Russian occupation to date: murder, torture, imprisonment, rape, child abduction, and so on. Leave aside the broader consequences, for Ukraine and the world, of so conspicuously rewarding military aggression.
Leave aside the underlying assumption: that Russia cannot be expelled from these territories, even as its forces are being depleted and its economy collapses – or how these might be accelerated if the West ever got serious about providing weapons to Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia.
No, just think about the condition on which this surrender of land is supposed to be predicated: those fabulous security guarantees. The ones that the United States wants to fob off on Europe, that Europe wants to fob off on the Americans, that Russia offers to take off both their hands.
Even if Ukraine were a member of NATO, frankly, their security would be far from assured. But an alliance that cannot bring itself even to do that, led by a President who thinks Mr. Putin is his best friend, cannot be trusted to do anything.
No, the only real guarantee of Ukraine’s security is Ukraine’s army. If we support and sustain that army, Ukraine will have no need to concede any of its territory to Russia. If we do not, we will soon find it is not only Ukraine that is making such concessions.