Trump and Putin in Alaska is a study in contrasts

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Donald Trump is famously unpredictable. Vladimir Putin is famously predictable. The American President is impatient. The Russian President is patience personified. The United States has no troops on the ground in Ukraine. Russia has nearly 700,000 troops fighting a war that has gone on for almost 1,270 days. Estimates of American deaths in the conflict vary widely but seldom surpass 100. Estimates of Russian deaths are unreliable but are probably in the range of 250,000.

Mr. Trump wants and, given his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, needs a peace settlement. Mr. Putin may be less desperate for a settlement but, if reports of domestic economic distress and growing anti-war dissent in his nearly cloistered country are correct, may need one.

In this context – and in the setting of an American military base in Alaska, a onetime Russian territory that, pointedly, both czars and commissars have regretted relinquishing – the two presidents are meeting on Friday in a single-shot – and long-shot – effort to win peace in a war 7,700 kilometres away.

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The site of the summit is Anchorage, the starting line of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, where mushers compete in an event that has copyrighted the slogan “the Last Great Race on Earth.” The obstacles to a quick and easy settlement of the combat in Ukraine are – like the blizzards, whiteouts, swirling winds and plunging temperatures encountered in the long-distance slog of the sled-dog race – formidable.

But, then again, the host of the parley at the summit, as Winston Churchill described such a meeting in a colourful phrase from 1950, is Mr. Trump.

“With Trump, we should rule out nothing,” Samuel Charap, a RAND Corporation political scientist specializing in Russia and Eurasia policy, said in an interview. “The spectrum of the possible is pretty wide. We can hope they begin a serious negotiating process at a working level, with names of officials, a place, deadlines, eventual seats for the Ukrainians and the Europeans, and a mandate to produce a later framework agreement for a settlement.”

This summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson mixes lethal combat, vital geopolitical issues and vastly conflicting ideologies with nearly the full spectrum of human behaviour and character, for Mr. Trump’s capriciousness, compulsiveness, volatility and streaks of emotion are in direct contradiction with Mr. Putin’s discipline, determination, inflexibility and heartless stoicism.

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The American President has left summits in love (with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, in 2019) and in rage (with then Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, in 2018).

The Russian President has a more established manner of behaviour, and in relation to the war in Ukraine, an almost entrenched pattern: willingness to continue the war in the hope of wearing out the West, exhausting Ukraine and tempting his American counterpart to sweeten the U.S. relationship with Russia through money, trade and global celebration of Mr. Trump as a man of peace without relinquishing at least substantial territorial gains.

“I will be very surprised if he doesn’t stick to his long-term patterns,” said William Taubman, the Amherst College expert on Russia and biographer of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev. “Putin has pretty good intelligence about Trump, his weaknesses and the mercurial nature of Trump that we are familiar with. He’s been playing Trump and is prepared to continue playing Trump. The only question is whether his efforts to play Trump will prevail over the efforts of some people in the Senate, the Ukrainians, the Europeans and others to stiffen Trump’s spine.”

In any case, the geopolitical stakes are so high, and the “sunk costs” that economists often speak of are so great, that a swift resolution to the war would be an astonishing development. A ceasefire, though, is not out of the question, but the experience of the Christmas truce in the First World War, and cessations of hostilities in the Vietnam War, Northern Ireland and, more recently, the Israel-Hamas war, underline the fragility of such agreements.

Absent from the Alaska table is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the domestic situation inside his country will be present. A Gallup poll conducted last month showed that support for continuing combat had reached a new low, with 69 per cent of Ukrainians favouring a negotiated end to the war – a dramatic rise from three years ago, when about the same rate supported fighting until victory.

At home, Mr. Trump is being warned not to be lured into concessions to Mr. Putin.

For 87 years, the 1938 settlement with Adolf Hitler at Munich has been both a dangerous precedent (feckless surrender to aggressors) and a promiscuously misused metaphor (the domino theory that deepened French, and then American, commitments in Indochina). Nonetheless, Mr. Trump, not ordinarily history-minded, sees himself more as Churchill, who fought appeasement of Nazi Germany, than as Neville Chamberlain, who won an artificial and tragically temporary surface victory at Munich.

“I believe he wants to get it over with,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin. “Now, I’ve said that a few times and I’ve been disappointed because I’d have, like, a great call with him and then missiles would be lobbed into Kyiv or some other place and you’d have 60 people laying on a road dying.”

That’s why modest hopes for this summit prevail.

“We can’t go from a war of this length and intensity to an end of the fighting swiftly,” said Mr. Charap, co-author of Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia. “You need serious and probably pretty protracted working negotiations to get the details ironed out and to get the sides to agree they want this. We haven’t had a process like that.”