Trump/Putin summit prebrief

How we got here and what to expect

Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism.

Greetings from the UK! No round-up this week, but instead prebrief/debrief posts about the Trump/Putin summit in Alaska. First, the prebrief.

I have a lot of different thoughts about this so I’ll present them in a list:

1. Going into this summit, the image I have in mind is of a tiger “negotiating” with a defenseless child. Trump is stupid, uninformed, and emotionally immature. Even though he likes to think of himself as the “dealmaker in chief”, in truth this sort of one-on-one interaction is the thing that he is worse at. The policies he enacts which end up being successful in the sense of achieving their intended goals tend to be things where he has a broad idea and then someone else does the actual implementation. When it comes to hashing out a complicated policy problem using his own wits, his track record is basically zero.

2. I don’t think Putin is the genius that he is made out to be, and he clearly has his own issues with being disconnected from reality - see, for instance, his views on Ukrainian sovereignty - but he’s not an idiot, nor uninformed, in the sense that Trump is. He knows these issues inside out and dedicates a large portion of his waking hours to figuring out how to get what he wants. He has a consistent goal and an idea of how to achieve it. This may be one of the best chances he will ever get.

3. This mismatch between the two adversaries is reflected in the fact that so far, Putin has been running rings around Trump - a fact reflected in the tone of bewilderment and rage coming out of the White House over the last few months.

4. Let’s remember how we got here: Trump said that he would end the war in 24 hours, but found quickly that this wasn’t possible (surprise!), even after lowering his immediate goal to a temporary ceasefire. He identified Putin’s intransigence as the key reason why this wasn’t possible (again, surprise!) and then repeatedly threatened Moscow with consequences if it didn’t agree to a ceasefire. He then never once followed through with imposing those consequences. When his failure to do this became so obvious that he would have to do something, he suggested holding this summit instead.

5. I wonder a bit about mismatched expectations between the two sides going into this summit. Usually, a meeting of this nature between U.S. and Russian leaders would be tightly planned and choreographed, with clear deliverables planned in advance. Putin would be forgiven for thinking that Trump would only suggest a summit of this nature if he planned a major policy shift to facilitate an agreement. But the message coming out of the White House is that they just want to hear what Putin has to say and that nobody should expect anything major to happen.

6. But the White House line is absurd - everyone already knows what Putin wants because he says so all the time. Trump and Putin have had more phone calls than I can keep track of. So from the American perspective, it’s difficult to see what the point of this is supposed to be. There are, I think, two possibilities for how they’re looking at it: they either plan to make a major shift, or they’re just doing this because they have no real plan and they’ve run out of other delaying tactics. They certainly have no reason to expect Putin to change his tune - his forces are advancing on the battlefield and Trump has squandered what leverage he had by failing to follow through on any of his threats.

7. So what outcomes might we expect from the summit? Let me suggest three possibilities.

8. The surrender. This is the scenario that I’m most scared of: Trump essentially announcing that the U.S. agrees to Russia’s territorial demands in Ukraine and its demands for the withdrawal of NATO forces (or at least U.S. forces) from Eastern Europe. This would be a sort of “peace for our time” moment where Trump claims to have resolved U.S.-European-Russian security issues in one fell swoop and asks for a Nobel Peace Prize.

9. Would Trump go for this? I’m concerned that he might see this as an escape from the corner he’s boxed himself into. Trump currently looks very foolish, clearly having been outfoxed by Putin and reduced to raging impotently while the Russian war effort grinds on. Trump might think that announcing some sort of grand bargain allows him to transcend such petty carping. He’ll have ensured peace for our time, after all! Except, of course, he won’t.

10. The falling out. Another possibility is that things go sideways - Trump takes offence at Putin making a fool out of him and decides to engage in brinksmanship and escalation in an effort to get Russia to back down. This is dangerous in its own way, and I think it’s an under-rated possibility. If Trump storms out of the meeting or announces new sanction threats or other actions afterwards, it could put Russian-U.S. relations on a dangerous slide. Russia, after all, has its own means of applying pressure to the U.S. and the West. The ultimate dangers of this relationship getting out of hand are why it is usually tightly-scripted and choreographed and not left to the whims of a moron.

11. The fudge. Finally, there’s this Trump classic - the fudge. In this scenario, Putin and Trump make some sort of vague announcement that they’ve reached the framework of a deal, but the specifics are vague and soon collapse under analysis. They leave Alaska and lower-level officials get to work on working out those details, but it soon becomes clear that the framework hides insurmountable differences between both sides and we’re back to where we started. The war grinds on, and Putin is the real winner, because every month his forces are advancing on the battlefield and Ukraine’s military supplies are running out.

I hope this broad sketch is useful. I’m not going to make predictions about specific diplomatic or policy areas, because that’s best discussed in retrospect once we see the results of the summit. I’ll write a debrief over the weekend.

Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism.