Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. This week there’s a scheduled summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump, and it’s scheduled to be held in Anchorage, Alaska.
Apparently, this was a place that offered a great deal of security. It’s a smaller, controllable city. It’s in the United States, but on the other hand, it’s one of the closest places, major cities, to Russia itself from the United States.
We don’t have a very good history of summits. And many summits—as you remember, in March of 2017, Antony Blinken, the Biden secretary of state, and Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, met with their Chinese communist counterparts. And they were dressed down and humiliated and really didn’t say anything. And what followed then from that was further Chinese aggression toward Taiwan, the Chinese balloon, etc. So these summits are very important.
One thing that we’re not hearing from the Left and the Never-Trump Right is that Donald Trump is a “Putin asset,” a “Putin puppet.” I’m quoting pretty loosely, but accurately, what former National Intelligence Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan have been saying for 10 years on social media and on cable news.
And the reason they’re not saying that Donald Trump is a Putin puppet and going to be had is that he gave Putin an “Art of the Deal” leeway when he first came into office and he doubled down on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. He basically was saying, “Putin, see, I’m giving you an opportunity.” Putin did not take it. Donald Trump pivoted and found out that he had to use leverage against Putin.
And the leverage he’s going to use, or has threatened to use, is far more deleterious to Russia and far more dangerous and far more ambitious than anything imagined by former President Joe Biden, namely, a secondary boycott. That would be to not trade with countries that trade with Russia. That could include the two largest countries in the world, India and China.
India had very close relations with us. We were trying to triangulate India against China. They have their own border disputes and long-standing disagreements. But if we secondary boycott India, that will be a rumination of our relations with India. So, what I’m getting at is Donald Trump’s taking a lot of risk, a lot of risk in using a secondary boycott to pressure Putin.
Ninety percent of the issues are already solved. They have been for a year or two. We’re now in a deadlock. Russia claims they’ve only lost 200,000 dead. But they more likely lost a million dead, wounded, missing, taken prisoner. We don’t know the exact ratios of each. And probably Ukraine with their dead, missing, wounded, prisoners around, I don’t know, 400,000 or 500,000. So this is like a Stalingrad or a Somme or a Verdun.
We know the general parameters. We’ve discussed them before. Ukraine will not be in NATO. That’s a concession to Putin. But it really isn’t a concession because, privately, a lot of the NATO members did not want Ukraine because they had no intention of going all the way to the Donbas, should Russia invade again, on Article 5 of the NATO doctrine. They were not going to follow that. So they don’t want Ukraine in NATO. Neither do we. I’m not sure Ukraine even does, privately.
Secondly, there was no military ability. There’s a moral argument for, but no military ability, to take back Crimea and take back the Donbas.
So what we’re discussing now is that the Russian army is about a hundred miles west from the border in Crimea, the Donbas, and then further west. In total, about a hundred miles. That would be the DMZ—in other words, the Demilitarized Zone, where we have a ceasefire, an armistice. And then we would haggle in a peace conference over exchanges of territory on either side. That’s the outline of peace.
The problem is that—there’s two problems. One: Ukraine’s Constitution says no land—no land, not Crimea, not Donbas—nothing can be ceded to a foreign country without a plebiscite. And we don’t know what the Ukrainian people will say. They polled they’re tired of the war. They polled they don’t want to give one inch of their sovereign territory.
On the other side, Putin himself knows that he has to report to the oligarchic and military hierarchy. And he doesn’t know whether a hundred miles west, in addition to institutionalizing the possession of Crimea and the Donbas for good, whether that extra hundred miles from the border territory will justify the enormous losses, humiliation that the Russian military has suffered.
So, we’re gonna have this summit. And Trump is going to say to Putin, “You can have no NATO Ukraine. You can have the Crimea. You can have the Donbas. I think I can get Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people to agree. But we’ve gotta fight over how far west you are and whether you have to go back or will stay in place.”
And then he’s going to have to tell Zelenskyy, “We’re supplying you. That’s the only leverage we have against Putin, along with a secondary boycott. But you have to decide whether you’re going to cede the Donbas, Crimea, and some of the territory. Because if you don’t, there’s not going to be peace. And if there’s not going to be peace, we can’t assure you a blank check forever.”
So, that’s what the parameters are.
And one thing that we do know, the Never-Trump Right, as I said, and the Left have ceased the “Donald Trump is a puppet,” “Donald Trump is a sellout,” “Donald Trump is a Russian asset” because nobody in the last four years, in the Biden administration, has met with the Russians and especially the last three years since the war started. Nobody made the attempt.
So, at least we have the principles: talking to each other, we know what the outlines of a peace agreement are. And it’s just a matter of what each president has to take back to the powers that be and see if they’ve given too many or not enough concessions.
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