President Donald Trump is off to Alaska today, hopefully for a diplomatic event which yields better results than the last time the 50th state served as such a venue.
If you’ll remember, four years ago, Joe Biden’s new secretary of state, Tony Blinken, went to Alaska for a sitdown with his Chinese counterpart. That did not go very well, as the Chinese delegation proceeded to browbeat Blinken with a protracted narrative castigating America along the same woke lines that Biden’s campaign had embraced in the previous year’s election.
Hopefully, this meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin goes a little better. What’s obvious at this point is that the Russo–Ukrainian War, which began early in Biden’s second year in office and has devolved into a mostly pointless stalemate wasting blood and treasure on all sides, needs to end at the negotiating table. That’s been obvious for three years now. (RELATED: Trump, Putin, and Peace in Ukraine)
It’s also obvious, however, that neither Putin nor his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy are very serious about making a peace deal. And for Trump, that’s a confounding issue. He should be able to broker something — after all, since retaking office, he’s brokered no less than seven agreements to douse regional fires, the most recent one a deal to end the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. (RELATED: Trump Brokers 11th Peace Deal. More to Come?)
Maybe the best way to describe this would be to say that if Trump can’t get a deal to end the Ukraine war, no such deal is possible.
That would be sad.
What else is sad is that Trump’s Alaska trip will take our attention away from one of the most bizarre political weeks we’ve ever seen. Something so conventional and substantive as peace negotiations is utterly out of place amid what we’ve had on our plates.
For example...
1. Behold, The Heat Miser Speaks. And He’s Not Very Trumpy At All.
If you’re a Gen Xer or above, you probably saw A Year Without a Santa Claus, which debuted on ...