The Alaska Summit: A Symposium

Our experts weigh in…

The Realist Review and The American Committee for US-Russia Accord have gathered over a dozen experts on US-Russia relations and US foreign policy to share their thoughts on Friday’s summit in Alaska.

Below are contributions from Michael Vlahos, Norman Solomon, Ted Snider, Martin Sieff, Richard Sakwa, Nicolai Petro, Christopher Mott, Scott McConnell, Jack F. Matlock, Anatol Lieven, Peter Kuznick, Paul Grenier, James W. Carden, and Kyle Anzalone.

***

Commentary on the Anchorage Event is curiously without context. What does it mean? This was no de novo event, unique in the annals of history. So how does it compare to a millennial lineage of ceremonial antecedents? Crickets.

The closest any commentary came was the bald invocation of the ancient Cold War term: Summit. Yet there is an historical trove of celebrated meetings between Dynasts, Emperors, Sultans, and other potentates, extending back into the mists of Time. Moreover, many of these meetings represented ceremonial occasions that decisively altered the course of history.

I cannot help but be reminded, for example, of the meeting between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander on a raft midstream in the Niemen to sign the first treaty of Tilsit (7July 1807).

Each of the two emperors had strategic objectives that went beyond the actual specifics of the occasion: To end two years of active hostilities between the French and Russian Empires.

The loser, Alexander, wanted very much not to look like a loser, and Napoleon accommodated that desire, by levying harsh terms on Frederick William and a prostrate Prussia. In contrast, Napoleon treated Alexander as an equal, and coming to a much bigger "settlement" that looked very much like a strategic partnership. In the wake of battlefield defeat, the Tsar came out way ahead.

Napoleon, for all his battlefield victories, needed desperately to translate them into real strategic gains. He had to find a path whereby the French Empire would be accepted by the old Dynasts, and above all, this meant Russia. Such a settlement also gave Bonaparte some hope that Britain might eventually be brought to heel.

Thus, the two emperors each had the capacity to give each other something of great value without giving anything up.

So too, do the two emperors, today, have something to give each other, while strengthening themselves in the bargain.

Like Napoleon, Putin needs a settlement that will bring Russia back into the Western fold. Battlefield victory means little if Ukraine becomes a forever war. Like Alexander, Trump needs to find a way to turn Western defeat in Ukraine into a victory for him (as peacemaker) and a new way ahead, in which a losing war is magically turned into a stable and bountiful new strategic relationship.

Yet Trump needs a cover, and this might be found in making Zelensky and his Euro-Crew the Fall Guys, just as poor Frederick William was at Tilsit. "They were standing in the way of peace!" "Their war would bring down both Europe and Ukraine!" "It might even lead to World War!"

Hence, the changeling raft at Anchorage — symbolically, like 1807, at the point where the US and Russia meet — might well initiate a ceremonial process through which the object of desire — the grand "settlement" — is assembled.

Remember, the ceremonial procession is the strategic cover.

Then, at the penultimate meeting, it would be announced in full and proper splendor.

Michael Vlahos is a Sr. Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy.

***

Summit coverage in US news media was often anxious about the danger of an unjust peace, while an end to the killing in Ukraine received little emphasis as an appropriate priority. What did preoccupy elite media was whether the two presidents might find common ground – and to the extent they seemed to reach it in Alaska, headlines were alarmed. Washington Post: “Russia Sees Victory as Trump Adopts Putin’s Approach to Ending Ukraine War.” New York Times: “Trump Backs Off Cease-Fire Demand in Ukraine War, Aligning With Putin.” New York Times again: “Trump Bows to Putin’s Approach on Ukraine…”

It's too soon to know whether the summit was useless or might turn out to be a real step toward actual diplomacy, but the overall outlook is grim. Along the way, the dominant media worldview in the United States hardly encourages vital compromise, instead it routinely depicts relations between the US and Russia as a zero-sum contest. The standard narratives assume that some countries have legitimate security concerns, some don’t, and Russia clearly doesn’t. From here to the horizon, “crackpot realism” seems very likely to prevail.

Norman Solomon is the National Director of RootsAction

***

The war is now going disastrously for Ukraine. The Russian armed forces have breached their defensive lines, partially encircled key logistical hubs and nearly cut off Ukraine’s forces in the east from their supplies. The Ukrainian armed forces face the threat of collapse and of Russia occupying all the Donbas. The Donbas will likely fall in months, and maybe weeks. Putin told Trump that his forces can now capture all of Donbas when they want to.

For those who want a diplomatic solution rather than a military solution that will provide the same terms at a significantly greater cost of Ukrainian lives, the summit seems to offer some hope.

Trump said if it wasn’t a success, there would be severe consequences for Russia. After the summit, he said that oil sanctions were off for now. Though it is not yet known what was said, Putin said they had reached an understanding that he hoped the agreement they reached could help them get closer to peace.

Trump came out of the summit saying that the best path to peace is “to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement” and that now “it’s really up to President Zelensky to get it done.”

Hopefully, they can get it done.

Ted Snider is a foreign policy analyst and columnist at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute and a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative.

***

The terms of the Ukraine peace deal hammered out between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are a total triumph for Putin and Russia. But no better agreement could possibly have been reached: And President Trump deserves the highest praise for recognizing the inevitable and biting the bullet.

Now, at last, the killing can stop. And Russia was never, ever going to settle for less after all its own losses and sacrifices, and the global hatreds it has been subjected to.

It is the best deal for the Ukrainian people that anyone could get: The Ukrainian people will need at least a generation to recover from the horrendous losses of up to 1.5 million prime age men, sacrificed by criminally incompetent leaders who listened to worthless US and British bemedalled generals who did not have a clue. The poor, brave Ukrainians were lions led by donkeys, as historian Alan Clark described the generation of British dead lost for no end in World War I.

However, President Trump will now be subjected to every threat, pressure and even physical danger to try and force him to abandon the deal and go back to the policy of sacrificing unending Ukrainian lives as cannon fodder.

The British and (remaining) US deep states and the European elites are still determined on that.

Martin Sieff is former Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Washington Times, where he received three Pulitzer nominations for International Reporting and former Managing Editor and Chief News Analyst for United Press International. He has covered Soviet/Russian and Eastern European affairs continually for the past 39 years.

***

The Political West is facing the greatest challenge to its existence since its creation during the Cold War. The Trump phenomenon represents four potential defections: from the Atlantic alliance system; from the UN-based Charter International System; from the letter and spirit of the US Constitution; and finally, from the hallowed traditions of US governance, described by Steve Bannon as the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’. Other potential defections include from the liberal economic order through the weaponization of tariff policy.

The most disturbing aspect of these multiple defections is the weakness of the intellectual and political response from within the Political West. The greatest resistance comes from outside, the nascent Political East and the Global South. A post-Western global alignment is emerging in defense of the Charter values that the West itself is repudiating.

In this context, the rapprochement between Russia and the US signaled in Alaska on 15 August represents a reversion to traditional forms of great power comity, of the Yalta- Potsdam sort that Moscow has always considered the most appropriate form to manage European, and indeed global, security issues. This has thrown the defenders of the old-style Political West into a panic, including even the threat of going it alone if the US takes the threat of the various defections to their logical confusion. While the Trumpian US is moving towards the reassertion of the national interest as the cardinal value, the legacy European powers continue to live in the double standard world of militarized liberal globalism.

Richard Sakwa is Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Kent. His latest book is The Culture of the Second Cold War.

***

The Alaska Summit was an undoubted success. As proof, I submit that Putin repeated several times during his press conference that he and Trump had a relationship of trust or confidence (doverotel'nye otnosheniya).

While Trump instead used the term “productive,” it is nonetheless clear that this meeting has rekindled the personal chemistry the two leaders once shared. It is interesting to note that the Russiagate scandal, which was designed to deepen the rift between them, has instead reinforced their bond.

In his own remarks Trump alluded to certain “agreements,” though we do not yet know what these are. Still, it is obvious that significant progress toward a settlement of the war was made, because President Zelensky is flying to Washington to meet personally with President Trump as soon as possible. I would not be surprised if, on the heels of this meeting, a three way summit meeting of Presidents Zelensky, Trump and Putin is announced.

It is tempting to dismiss the EU as a useless appendage to these talks, but this would be a mistake. The security interests of Ukraine and Russia are interlinked not only with each other, but with Europe as a whole, and it is imperative that European elites understand this. If these interests can be linked together in a pan-European security framework, then territorial disputes will eventually resolve themselves, just as they did in post-war Europe.

Another way to think of it is this: Russia must again become a part of Europe, so that Ukraine can become a part of Europe.

Nicolai N. Petro is professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island and a Sr. Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. His latest book is The Tragedy of Ukraine.

***

Trump's mercurial nature and Putin's growing battlefield advantage leave me extremely skeptical that a positive and lasting outcome will come from this first meeting. That being said, I am glad the two foremost nuclear powers are talking directly again. Whether my skepticism is hopefully proven wrong or not, one thing I can predict with certainty is that the majority of the press will have a meltdown.

Unipolarity has spoiled the average foreign affairs journalist, who seems to believe that diplomacy is something that only exists between friends, rather than a difficult process most relevant for adversaries. I recommend mandatory screenings of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country for a valuable and press-accessible way of exploring the inherent nobility of trying to reduce great power tensions, as well as the dangers of the many saboteurs in multiple countries whose vested interests lead them to sabotage such actions.

One can only hope that greater prospects of peace in Europe could lead to greater prospects of peace in the Middle East too. If Putin could come to America, so can Trump, perhaps with Putin's help, go to Iran. To quote Spock in the aforementioned movie, "There is an old Vulcan proverb; only Nixon could go to China."

Christopher Mott is a Washington Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy who focuses on neoclassical realist grand strategy and historical geopolitics.

***

I am cautiously optimistic about the Anchorage summit, though I fear my hopeful feelings will be undone when Zelensky and Europe's Ukraine hawks descend upon the White House on Monday. Trump’s apparent nod towards seeking a genuine settlement rather than a ceasefire implies that there will be at least some attention paid to the Russian grievances which provoked the war, particularly Nato expansion. There was a brief piece Saturday in the principal establishment ideological gatekeeper, the Times, about what Putin meant by “root causes” which of course had to mention Russia’s “existential” fear of Nato expansion, and to the extent that will now be discussed ought to shift America’s Ukraine conversation beyond childish phrases about Putin’s “warmongering” and unrelenting desire to march armies into Europe. The Times mention of the issue seemed to me virtually without precedent since the 1990s, when the expanders prevailed in the Senate. The credit must go to President Trump and his lack of deference to the foreign policy blob’s narratives and taboos. His apparent desire for non-antagonistic relations with Moscow is a good thing on almost every level.

Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative.

***

From the standpoint of U.S. and Russian national interests, the meeting of the two presidents in Anchorage was as successful as could reasonably have been expected. Its main achievement was establishing direct, face-to-face communication between the leaders of two peer nuclear powers who possess enough weapons to destroy mankind.

Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev declared in their first meeting in 1985: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought” then added that this meant there could be no war between their countries. That axiom still holds though it has been ignored by recent U.S. presidents who aspired to bring erstwhile Soviet republics such as Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.

No United States government would allow hostile foreign military bases on or anywhere close to its borders. (Note the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. I was at our embassy in Moscow then and translated some of Khrushchev’s messages.) Why is it hard to understand that Russia also will not tolerate hostile foreign military bases on its border?

President Putin has a plausible reason to avoid an immediate cease-fire: previous commitments (the Minsk agreements in 2015 and 2016) were violated by the Ukrainian government with the support of signatories France and Germany. Former German chancellor Angela Merkel has remarked that the agreements were used to re-arm Ukraine even as Ukraine refused to amend its constitution to provide cultural autonomy to its Russian-speaking Donbas provinces as the agreement, and the original Ukrainian constitution, provided.

Ending the fighting in and around Ukraine will not be easy. It will require, as a minimum, some territorial concessions by Ukraine and credible assurance that land under Ukrainian control will not be used to threaten Russian security. There is no evidence yet that President Zelensky and his European backers are prepared to accept that.

Nevertheless, it is not in the interest of the American people to continue to isolate Russia or to provide weapons to Ukraine. If President Trump recognizes that and continues to press for territorial exchanges to end the Ukrainian war, to reopen economic relations with Russia, and to begin realistic negotiations to limit strategic weapons, he will serve not only American interests but those of our European allies, whether or not they recognize it today.

Jack F. Matlock served on the National Security Council during the Reagan administration and was President Reagan's Ambassador to the USSR from 1987-1991. He is the author of numerous books including Superpower Illusions.

***

Most of the Western commentary on the Alaska summit is criticizing President Trump for precisely the wrong reason. The accusation is that by abandoning his call for an unconditional ceasefire as the first step in peace talks, Trump has surrendered a key position and “aligned himself with Putin.”

This is nonsense. What Trump has done is to align himself with reality, and the real charge against him is that he should probably have done this from the start, and saved six months of fruitless negotiations and thousands of Ukrainian and Russian lives. Moreover, by continually emphasising a prior ceasefire as his key goal, Trump set himself up for precisely the kind of criticism that he is now receiving.

The full text of Dr. Lieven’s analysis can be found here: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-ukraine-russia-agreement/

Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

***

It is disheartening to see the Western and especially U.S. response to the Trump-Putin summit, which the media and its reliable stable of “experts” view primarily in terms of winners and losers. The consensus is that Putin won and Trump lost with Zelensky and the Europeans potentially paying the biggest price. Such comments miss the big picture. The summit represented a huge step forward not only in improving relations between the world’s nuclear superpowers but in creating an atmosphere in which peace and a new security architecture can prevail. It represented a smaller, though not insignificant, step toward ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

It was only last November that the world shuddered when Biden gave permission to Ukraine to strike deep inside Russia with US ATACMS. It was late 2022 that the CIA reported a 50-50 chance of Russia using nuclear weapons to halt the Ukrainian counter-offensive. The world was teetering on the brink. By contrast, it was a welcome sight that the two men who have the unbridled capacity to end life on our planet were greeting each other warmly and negotiating rather than calling each other dictators, warmongers, and murderers, this coming only a few days after Trump announced sending two nuclear submarines toward Russia.

Admittedly, the results were somewhat underwhelming in terms of acknowledged deliverables. An expected six-to-seven-hour meeting ended in less than three and Trump’s demeanor at the press conference seemed uncharacteristically subdued though his subsequent statements were more upbeat. But, more encouragingly, there is a growing acceptance of the fact that Ukraine is not going to claw back the 20 percent of its territory that Russia has gained and will only lose more soldiers and land the longer the fighting goes on. That it’s in everyone’s interest to end this fighting as quickly as possible should be evident to any reasonable person though it is not to Zelensky and the coalition of those will to fight to the last Ukrainian who will be joining him in Washington on Monday in a hopefully futile attempt to keep the war going.

Given Russia’s relatively rapid advances on the battlefield and apparent willingness to show some flexibility perhaps to secure friendlier relations with the U.S. and Ukraine’s disadvantage in manpower, ammunition, air defense, and morale, this is the time to push for a negotiated settlement that reflects both countries’ security concerns. As an atomic bomb survivor in Akira Kurosawa’s powerful movie Rhapsody in August comments upon hearing that the U.S. is contemplating using atomic bombs in Korea, “Sometimes an unjust peace is better than a just war.” That is especially true in the nuclear age.

Peter Kuznick is Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He is co-author with Oliver Stone of The Untold History of the United States.

***

In his online reaction to the Anchorage summit, Zelensky’s former media advisor Oleksii Arestovich stated that he was positively impressed, among much else, by Putin’s declaration that Ukrainians “are a fraternal people” and that what is happening in Ukraine “is a tragedy for us” (i.e., for all Russians). Putin also made a series of impressive gestures emphasizing his Christian faith, Arestovich noted.

In this same social media post, Arestovich lamented the decadence of global mass media, which offer a constant flow of “hype … disparagement and ridicule” while eschewing any sober assessment of what has actually happened.

My own non-systematic review of the response to Anchorage tends to confirm Arestovich’s conclusion. The New York Times, for example, wrote that “Mr. Putin offered a cease-fire in the rest of Ukraine at current battle lines and a written promise not to attack Ukraine or any European country again.” The paper of record then adds that Putin “has broken similar promises before” without bothering to explain on which other occasions Putin’s promise not to attack Europe has been broken “before.” Nor did the journalists at the Times volunteer (by way of balance?) any examples of the U.S. having violated ‘similar promises.’

The British-Canadian international affairs scholar Paul Robinson wrote recently that the biggest obstacle to achieving peace with Russia will continue to be the many “spoilers” dead set against any such thing. At the vanguard of such ‘spoilers,’ it can be inferred from a brilliant essay by Valerie Stivers, will continue to stand, as they have stood now for more than a decade, liberal Americans with their “self-righteous belief in a fight for freedom and democracy, based on an enmity they only half-understand …”

Paul R. Grenier is the president and founder of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.

***

Even if the deliverables from the Alaska talks were slight, Trump and Putin seem to understand better than most the wisdom of Harold Macmillan’s comment (often attributed to Churchill) that “Meeting jaw to jaw is better than war.” Putin’s preference to “jaw to jaw” with his Ukrainian and European counterparts over the course of the six years of the Minsk Process backfired badly on him—those six years were used not to come to a peaceful settlement but to buy the Ukrainian armed forces time (as Angela Merkel admitted in her memoirs), and to integrate them under the EuroAtlantic security umbrella. Former President Joe Biden refused to negotiate with Putin before the war and then refused to do so for the remainder of his term. So a face-to-face in Alaska seems a step in the right direction. Trump’s task now is to persuade Zelensky and his EuroEnablers such as Merz and Macron and Starmer that their demand for a ceasefire prior to negotiations is a non-starter.

Putin was fooled once by the Europeans (via the Minsk process), he won’t be fooled again.

James W. Carden is editor of The Realist Review and a senior adviser to The American Committee for US-Russia Accord.

***

Over the past week, the impasse to end the Ukraine War became clear. Russian President Vladimir Putin will settle for nothing less than taking the Donbas and the territory Russia controls in South Ukraine. President Donald Trump agrees with Putin that Ukraine will need to give up some territory to end the war. And Ukrainian President Zelensky says Kiev is unwilling to cede any territory.

Maybe the most significant line in the short presser following Friday’s summit in Alaska was Trump explaining that he will allow Zelensky to reject any deal. “I will call up NATO in a little while, and I'll of course, call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today's meeting. It's ultimately up to them. They're going to have to agree,” he said.

The big question is how Trump responds. America is the generator keeping Ukraine’s life support running. Trump could inform Zelensky that he will pull the plug if the Ukrainian leader does not accept territorial concessions. Or he could revert back to the Joe Biden administration policy of sending endless arms to Ukraine and sanctioning Russia.

Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Anitwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute. He hosts The Kyle Anzalone Show and is co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Connor Freeman.

*Contributors are listed in descending alphabetical order.