By listening to Putin and embracing reality, Trump has committed a cardinal sin which the foreign policy establishment may never forgive him for.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
Cross-posted from Scheerpost
No, the Trump–Putin summit at a joint-forces military base in Anchorage last Friday did not produce an agreement on a ceasefire in Ukraine. President Trump made no reference to “severe consequences” if Vladimir Putin did not consent to such an accord. Nothing was said about new sanctions against Russia and nothing about sanctions against nations that trade with Russia. Trump appears not to have mentioned those nuclear-armed submarines he ordered to “appropriate regions” a couple of weeks ago, and Putin seems not to have asked about them.
No, there was no such talk at Joint Base Elmendorf–Richardson. After not quite three hours behind closed doors with the Russian president, Trump departed Anchorage ahead of schedule, dropping the thought that he and Putin might linger so that Volodymyr Zelensky, president of the autocratic Ukrainian regime, could join them for further talks.
And so the story got written after the summit concluded. “No ceasefire, no deal,” the BBC concluded curtly. “Trump and Putin Put on a Show of Friendship but Come Away Without a Deal,” The New York Times reported late Friday. And from CNN, which had a dozen reporters on the story beneath this headline: “Trump–Putin summit ends without concrete deal.”
How yesterday, how swiftly passé all that early coverage proves but three days after Trump returned to Washington and Putin to Moscow. As of follow-on talks at the White House Monday with Zelensky and a swarm of European leaders, Trump seems to have rendered a ceasefire utterly beside the point in favor of an agreement he is fashioning with Putin that, if it comes to be — and we must stay with “if” for now — will prove stunningly concrete. Trump is after an enduring peace now — this as a subset of a new era in U.S.–Russian relations. Pull this off and he will improve his place in the history texts by magnitudes.
We do not know, and may never know, precisely what the two leaders said to one another behind closed doors as their interpreters and their foreign ministers, Sergei Lavrov and Marco Rubio, sat beside them. But it did not take long for Trump to start unpacking the plan he and Putin began to fashion during their talks. In post-summit interviews and social media posts, and in his encounters with Zelensky and his European sponsors at the White House Monday, Trump has made it plain as rain that an awful lot of something was discussed at a summit where nothing was reported to get done.
Within hours of the summit, Trump said in an interview with Fox News that he and Putin were near an agreement on an exchange of territories between Russia and Ukraine and that there would be security guarantees for the latter after the cessation of hostilities. “There are points that we negotiated and those points that we largely have agreed on,” Trump told Sean Hannity.
There is no telling how close or far Washington, Moscow, Kiev and (to the extent they matter) the Europeans may be from a comprehensive settlement. “Largely” covers an infinitude of near misses and failures, and Donald Trump is, after all, Donald Trump. But I read in this quick pencil-sketch a suggestion of the give-and-take dynamic between Trump and Putin: Russia will get some of the land is has fought for these past three years, which, if you look at a map, amounts to a security guarantee against the aggressions of viscerally Russophobic Ukrainians; the United States and the Western powers will cease arming the Kiev regime — another kind of guarantee. The Ukrainians will give up land but get security guarantees of their own.
Does this strike you as an unbalanced proposition? It should. Implicit in it is something Trump understands but Ukraine, the Europeans and the hawks in Washington simply refuse to accept: However long the fighting may drag pointlessly on, Ukraine is the vanquished in this war; Russia the victor.
We have had a slow roll of revelations since the Fox News interview. Reuters reported a day after the summit that Trump told Zelensky during a post-summit telephone call that it was time to “make a deal” with Moscow, which must include ceding some land to Russian sovereignty. “Russia is a very big power, and you’re not,” Trump reportedly told the Ukrainian president. Reuters said it reflected Putin’s demand in Anchorage that the Kiev regime recognize Russian sovereignty over all of the Donbas, the eastern regions of Ukraine that Russia formally annexed in September 2022 and parts of which, but not all, are under Russian military control.
Later Saturday came the big one, or a big one, as the post-summit situation is nothing if not kinetic. “It was determined by all,” Trump declared on his Truth Social platform, “that the best way to end the horrific war between Russia and Ukraine is to go directly to a Peace Agreement, which would end the war, and not a mere Ceasefire Agreement, which oftentimes do not hold up.”
“A mere ceasefire.” Wow. So much for that. A peace agreement instead of a ceasefire, cap “P” and cap “A,” if you please. Wow times 10. This is a major, major departure from the demands long advanced by all of the Western powers and Ukraine — an implicit rejection, this is to say, of the prevalent anti–Russian orthodoxy. No Western leader, if you have not noticed, has ever called for an end to the war. None among them has ever mentioned a peace accord for the simple reason the Western powers do not want peace with Russia. It is with this statement, then, that Trump signaled his determination to chart new territory.
Zelensky’s intent as he made plans to see Trump Monday was to persuade him to pull him back from the frightening idea of a peace agreement and reinvest in the demand for a ceasefire. This was also what the crew from across the Atlantic had in mind. Kier Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz: The British, French and German leaders were there. So were Mark Rutte, the NATO sec-gen, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. Hawks all, this crowd. They arrived, as news reports indicated, in a state somewhere between alarm and panic.
Trump appears to have heard these people out on the ceasefire question, as was to be expected. But there is no indication that the thought went much beyond hypothetical notions of what might be discussed in an also hypothetical summit between Zelensky and Putin. And there is every indication Trump holds to his early post-summit disclosures, of which there is now more yet-to-be-confirmed detail, notably in the land-for-guarantees line and what Trump has meant in his mentions of “land swaps.”
After holding referendums three years ago, Russia formally annexed four regions of eastern Ukraine, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The first two of these comprise the Donbas and are the most strategically important to the Russians — who hold more or less all of Luhansk but only part of Donetsk. It now appears that Russia may be willing to give up its claims to Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in exchange for recognition of its sovereignty over the whole of the Donbas. Steve Witkoff, who serves as Trump’s special envoy, hinted at this in an interview with CNN on Sunday.
No clarity on the land question came out of the White House Monday. But Trump gave Zelensky one bit of reassurance that has raised many eyebrows in many places.
“We will give them very good protection, very good security,” Trump said as he recounted his discussions with Zelensky on the question of security guarantees. “That’s part of it.” This has been widely read as a suggestion that U.S. forces may participate in one or another kind of security cordon in postwar Ukraine, and Trump has not ruled out a U.S. military presence. But at this early stage of the diplomatic process Anchorage set in motion, all such questions are for now wet cement. “There are no details how it will work, and what America’s role will be, what Europe’s role will be,” Zelensky said Monday afternoon of whatever security guarantees are under discussion.
I have to say I find the thought of either Americans or Europeans operating on Ukrainian soil as guarantors of security something close to preposterous. Where and when in history have combatants or the sponsors of combatants switched to the role of peacekeepers? I am not at all surprised to read that the Russians, watching all this from afar, issued a vigorous objection Monday to the talk of American or European guarantors in a postwar environment.
Read the wording here carefully:
“We reaffirm our repeatedly stated position of categorical rejection of any scenarios involving the presence of a military contingent from NATO countries in Ukraine.”
Moscow’s problem is not only the thought of a NATO contingent. It is with any contingent from any NATO member.
The obvious conclusions here, and I do not see any avoiding either, are that Washington and Moscow are very, very far from signatures on paper, and it is well to listen to Donald Trump without drawing any conclusions other than these. As his record shows, Trump places a heavy weight on his personal relations with other leaders. As the post–Anchorage process continues, he is likely to discover this mode of operating has its limits.
On Monday, according to a European diplomat quoted in Reuters, he immediately telephoned Putin after his talks at the White House “and began the arrangements for a meeting, at a location to be determined, between President Putin and President Zelensky,” as he, Trump, put it on Truth Social. This is sheer showmanship, in my read. I have serious doubts Putin’s relations with Trump are such that he would find this kind of informality appropriate.
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Trump’s call for a peace pact is a reversal even of what he insisted upon less than two weeks ago. But most saliently to the point, it is an affirmation of the Kremlin’s position for who knows how long. The war must end, but a temporary ceasefire is of no use, the Kremlin has incessantly asserted. Ending the war decisively requires all sides to negotiate the circumstances that led to the war — the “root causes,” as Putin, Lavrov and every other Russian official speaking on the subject puts it.
Even before the encounter in Anchorage, we read countless reports in mainstream media that such a summit was a bad idea bearing with it a perilous risk that Trump would be “played” by the wily Russian president. Predictably enough, this is now the standard analysis. Trump “aligned with Putin,” The New York Times reported, “giving Russia an advantage in talks to end the fighting.” A story over the weekend in The Telegraph appeared under the headline, “Putin got exactly what he wanted from Trump.” There are bales of this stuff coming out in mainstream media as we speak.
More of same comes daily. The American Prospect ran a piece Monday under the headline “Putin’s Poodle.” In a positively disgraceful post on official “X” account, the Democratic Party published an AI–generated simulation of Trump on a leash held by Putin.
Serious discourse, anyone?
Inevitably, we read again the damning cliché. “He got played again,” Ivo Daalder, a been-around-forever militarist and America’s ambassador to NATO during the Obama years, said in an interview with The Times’s Peter Baker. This locution — “so-and-so got played,” or “so-and-so played so-and.so” — has fascinated me for years. This is because it always serves as a veil, purporting to mean something but with no meaning. What actually happens when someone plays another or someone gets played? So far as I can make out, this is when two people agree on something the person using this vulgar phrase does not like. Corollary: Smart people don’t get played; only stupid people get played.
The caker in the coverage this past weekend belongs to Peter Baker, The Times’s reliably sycophantic White House correspondent. “Even in the annals of Mr. Trump’s erratic presidency,” he writes, “the Anchorage meeting with Mr. Putin now stands out as a reversal of historic proportions.”
So far, so good. What happened in Anchorage is potentially historic. But then:
“The net effect was to give Mr. Putin a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending time-consuming negotiations for a more sweeping deal that appears elusive at best. Instead of a halt to the slaughter — ‘I’m in this to stop the killing,’ Mr. Trump had said on the way to Alaska — the president left Anchorage with pictures of him and Mr. Putin joshing on a red carpet and in the presidential limousine…”
Yes, seeking peace is enabling war, just as Orwell had it, and negotiating an enduring settlement covering causes would take too long to bother about. And those photographs: Horrible. They prolonged the slaughter. If Trump hadn’t greeted the Russian president civilly he could’ve got the ceasefire we want instead of an end to the war, which the people for whom I clerk do not want.
I’ve come to rely on Peter Baker for sound logic and good writing of this kind, honestly. It’s a form of fun over morning coffee.
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Trump sinned against the orthodoxy during those hours with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage. Twice, by my count. Either he did not read the catechism or he read it and put it aside. And the extent to which the summit proves an historic turn will be precisely the extent to which Trump continues in his sinful ways.
As noted, it remains unclear what exactly was said and what of substance will come of the Trump–Putin summit—what terms for a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine, the future of U.S.–Russian relations, etc. But in the course of his talks with Putin Donald Trump got one big, beautiful thing done: The president of the United States listened as the president of the Russian Federation spoke. Of this we can be certain, given Putin’s demeanor afterward and Trump’s post-summit interviews, social media posts and public statements. Trump listened as the world watched.
This amounts to a public assertion that Russia’s perspectives on the various crises at issue—apart from Ukraine there is NATO’s eastward advance, arms control, and a new security framework for East–West relations — must be heard and considered in the course of comprehensive negotiations. This, Trump’s first sin, is potentially an opening to a new geopolitical era, the door to that neo-détente some of us thought Trump would put in place during his first term until the Deep State sank his project by way of the Russiagate hoax — yes, Trump’s term is good enough — and various other disinformation and subterfuge operations.
The “centrist” leadership in Washington and the European capitals has refused to listen to Moscow for many years now; the media that publish the bulletins of these trans–Atlantic elites routinely make the case that anything Putin says is by definition the opposite of true and that listening to the Russians on any topic is beyond all the fence posts, irretrievably out-of-bounds. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of Trump’s transgression against this background.
Trump’s second sin is his evident embrace of reality. And reality, like listening, has also been off-limits for the centrist elites and those clerking for them in media on both sides of the Atlantic. This has been so at last since the U.S.–cultivated coup that brought the current regime of crooks and neo–Nazis to power 11 years ago. Those dwelling in the Kingdom of Pretend have carried on for months as if the Kiev regime can set the terms for any kind of settlement and Moscow will have no choice but to accept them. “Ukraine is also determined not to let Russia set the terms and structure of future peace talks,” The Times reported from Kiev in a pre-summit curtain raiser.
Not to let Russia…?
Along comes Trump to assert in so many words the war is lost — I have written this severally for more than a year — and that Kiev simply has no grounds to dictate the terms of what will at some point amount to its surrender even if it is never called by its name. Negotiate, yes. Insist upon, out of the question.
The yet-greater reality Trump now imposes on the proceedings has to do with the Russian position. The Western powers — and of course media — habitually dismiss Moscow’s concerns out of hand as if they are “unreasonable,” a common descriptive, or “nonstarters,” or have something to do with Putin’s grand plan to reconstitute — these people cannot make up their minds — either the Tzarist empire or the Soviet Union. Headline in The Times’s Sunday editions: “Putin Sees Ukraine Through a Lens of Grievance Over Lost Glory.”
A claim to historicity disguising a complete denial of history. Nothing in this piece, or virtually anywhere else in mainstream media, about the West’s post–Soviet betrayals, NATO’s near-complete encirclement of the Russian Federation, Putin’s years of efforts in behalf of a renovated security framework that — first rule in this kind of statecraft — benefits both sides and so stands the best chance of enduring.
If you read the transcript of the remarks Putin and Trump made after their talks — and here is the version published on the Kremlin’s web site — you detect easily enough the awareness of chronology and causality the two shared. Trump did not, in a phrase, erase the history preceding this moment — which is, now I think of it, yet a third of his sins. We should all join him in this. History is essential to understanding how things turned out in Anchorage.
To say Trump aligned with Putin, or got played or otherwise capitulated, is another way, a simpleton’s or cynic’s way, of denying or veiling reality. In my read, Trump listened to Putin’s case and has concluded, Yes, he is right. This is the ultimate reality long at issue and long unsayable. Trump has done no less and no more than speak this truth at last. The rest is rubbish.
Let us sin along with Trump, then, if we haven’t already. Let us all look past the mountain ranges of propaganda, cognitive warfare, perception management and what have you and say what Trump is now saying: It is time to acknowledge forthrightly that Putin is right about the war and its causes, about the Biden regime’s purposeful provocations, about the larger questions of which it is merely a subset and about how most sensibly to negotiate a lasting settlement in the borderlands between Europe and Russia and altogether between West and East.
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One of the most freighted moments during the time Putin and Trump spoke at their podiums after their talks — Putin first, Trump afterward — occurred when Putin suggested that Trump join him for another summit, this one in the Russian capital. “Next time in Moscow,” Putin said, apparently in English.
Trump’s reply weighs five hundred pounds.
“Oh, that’s interesting,” he said. “I don’t know. I’ll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.”
We are left with two questions. They are closely related; one is easily disposed of, the other is a graver matter.
How did Trump get from the incessant threats he leveled at Russia prior to the summit to the cordiality on display at Anchorage? What happened? What is the nature of the transformation?
I have little trouble with this. Setting aside Trump’s ever-shifting views on any given question, it looks to me now that all his pre-summit huffing and puffing was intended not for Putin’s ears but to mollify the choruses of Russophobes long prevalent in Washington’s policy circles. Before the summit you had Lindsey Graham banging on about “crushing the Russian economy” and “breaking the bones of the Russian economy” if Putin didn’t end the war within one or the other of those deadlines Trump set and then ignored. And the supercilious senator from South Carolina is among the squeakier voices among the hawks running around our nation’s capital.
Let us not forget: Amid all Trump’s inconstancy, he has never swerved from his desire to reconstruct relations with Russia just as he now appears intent on doing. In my read the real Donald Trump has just stood up.
Will he be able to get this done? This is the more serious line of inquiry.
Trump meetings Monday do not appear to have blown him off course. In my read Zelensky and the Europeans probably did a lot more listening than talking and are unlikely to get further than marginal adjustments in his determination to continue chasing his White Whale.
No, Trump’s bigger challenge has not yet made an appearance.
Trump tried during his first term to bring to a close a couple of the Deep State’s most essential theaters of animosity, and the apparatus — the intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the defense contractors, the think tanks, national security plants in media, the advisers these constituencies imposed on Trump — destroyed these efforts P.D.Q. One of these was Trump’s plan for a new détente with Moscow, which resulted in all those memorable Russiagate years.
The other was an accord with North Korea that would have defused decades of highly militarized tension in Northeast Asia. This was in the spring of 2019. As brilliantly reported by two Reuters correspondents, John Bolton, the fanatic then serving as Trump’s national security adviser, scuttled Trump’s ship the very day he was to structure an accord with Kim Jong-un during talks in Hanoi.
In the best of circumstances you never know what is next with Donald Trump. I mention these occasions because the more ambitious his plans for big policy breakthroughs the less we can be certain of their outcome. Peace is always a very dangerous topic to raise in Washington. Let us watch these next weeks and months, then — vigilantly, I mean.
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