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August 15, 2025, 10:06 PM View Comments ()

U.S. President Donald Trump drew a lot of flak for inviting Russian President Vladimir Putin onto U.S. soil for the first time in a decade, complete with a red carpet, a bright “Alaska 2025” sign, and a joint news conference. That was despite getting little from the Russian leader beforehand, save a pledge to continue killing Ukrainians and seizing their territory if the summit didn’t go precisely his way.

And as quickly became clear at the news conference the two leaders held Friday, Trump came away with less than the minimum he had hoped for, which was a temporary cease-fire. Despite Putin’s gracious words to Trump—and Trump’s description of him as a “fantastic” partner—the Russian appeared to give no ground whatsoever on his fundamental position that Ukraine is Russian territory and that he will not compromise.

Trump put his best spin on it all nonetheless. “We didn’t get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there,” Trump said, declaring that the talks were “extremely productive” and that “many points were agreed to.” But he acknowledged there was no progress on one that was “probably the most significant,” which may have been a cease-fire in Ukraine. The two walked out of the news conference without taking questions.

“There’s no deal until there’s a deal,” Trump said, restating his career-long philosophy as the supposed master of the “art of the deal.”

It didn’t help that, with no indication beforehand that he would get any concessions, Trump agreed to the summit in the first place. Typically, such high-stakes meetings are arranged only when there is reasonable indication of compromise on both sides. But Trump raised expectations by applauding and chatting amiably with a grinning Putin on the latter’s arrival in Alaska on Friday. He then invited Putin into his presidential limousine for a private chat.

That was an almost unheard-of move at a summit between major adversaries or rivals. Still, Trump will catch a lot more criticism for preemptively granting such optics to Putin—who has been indicted as a war criminal for committing innumerable atrocities during a war he started unprovoked—with nothing in return.

Indeed, Putin appeared to be eager to play to Trump’s vanity by claiming that, as Trump has often said without offering any evidence, Russia never would have invaded Ukraine had Trump, and not his predecessor Joe Biden, been president in 2022.

“Today, when President Trump was saying that if he was the president back then, there will be no war, and I’m quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” Putin said, in what could only be a suggestion that he believes Trump would have acceded to some Russian control over Ukraine.

The summit may have been doomed from the start by wildly mixed signals from the White House. The meeting occurred only a few weeks after Trump said he was fed up with Putin’s “bullshit.” “He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless,” Trump said in July. And as the week of the summit began, Trump indicated that he would oversee “some land swapping” between Russia and Ukraine—only then to tell European leaders that all he wanted was a cease-fire and that any division of territory would have to await the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. While Zelensky’s own negotiating position is also that a cease-fire must come first, he was not invited to the Alaska summit.

The two leaders did leave open the possibility of future talks. And many experts believe it’s long past time to try some kind of diplomacy after more than three years of a horrific war begun by Putin with no hope of resolution—and facing the likelihood that Ukraine will at some point lose. Not to mention, the persistent nuclear hair-trigger tensions between Moscow and the West as global stability slowly disintegrates.

“If you recall a year ago, Washington did not really allow any debate over how a diplomatic settlement to the war in Ukraine ought to be fashioned,” said George Beebe, the former head of the CIA’s Russia analysis who is now at the Quincy Institute. “That was anathema. Now we’re talking about it at least. Part of it is that Trump has made that kind of discussion possible. Part of it is we’re acknowledging a reality that the Ukrainians are not going to outlast the Russians in a war of attrition.”

Beebe and other foreign-policy experts were sometimes critical of Trump’s predecessor, President Joe Biden, who all but closed the door on negotiations with Putin despite saying repeatedly that talks were the only way out of the war.

But a continuing stalemate could mean that Trump comes out of this high-stakes meeting looking humiliated and ineffectual. Indeed, if he bows to any of Putin’s demands without Ukrainian assent or European cooperation, Trump will undoubtedly invite comparisons to Neville Chamberlain in Munich in 1938—when the British prime minister caved to Adolf Hitler—or, at the very least, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the Yalta summit in 1945. (FDR was accused of bowing to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s demands for the partition of Europe, and it didn’t help that Roosevelt dropped dead only two months later.)

Yet it’s also important to note that this moment doesn’t resemble either Munich or Yalta in what is at stake. Unlike Hitler, a badly weakened Putin is not about to march into Western Europe—and cross a united NATO—or even assert control over most of Ukraine, much less other former Eastern Bloc nations. Putin has already signaled many times that he would be satisfied with retaining control over Crimea, which he annexed in 2014 to little Western protest, as well as the eastern parts of Ukraine he now tenuously holds.

Perhaps the best possible outcome to the Alaska summit would have been a prolonged cease-fire along current front lines, with territorial questions left in abeyance—possibly even for decades. One future model could be the unresolved truce between North Korea and South Korea. Another reportedly could involve granting Russia de facto control of occupied Ukraine similar to Israel’s de facto—but not internationally recognized—rule of the West Bank. This idea was reportedly raised in discussions between Trump envoy Steve Witkoff and his Russian counterparts, according to the Times of London.  But neither side apparently got anywhere in discussing these ideas.

Hanging over the future will be nagging questions about Trump’s ability to be genuinely tough with Putin. This dates to their infamous first formal summit in Helsinki in July 2018, when Trump rejected his own intelligence experts and defended Putin’s denial of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election (which has since been documented). In between presidencies, Trump held a number of private meetings with Putin and frequently expressed admiration for him. Just before the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump actually praised Putin for his aggression. “I said, ‘This is genius,’” Trump told a right-wing radio program on Feb. 22, 2022.

Early in his second presidency, Trump openly insulted Zelensky; he repeatedly spoke over him at a White House meeting and actually blamed him for Putin’s aggression.

In recent weeks, however, Trump shifted course dramatically in response to Putin’s continuing aggression. The U.S. president hinted that he could impose so-called secondary sanctions on nations that buy Russia’s oil and gas—a move that could prove ruinous to Russia’s already faltering economy. Earlier in August, Trump doubled U.S. tariffs on India, to 50 percent, for buying oil and weapons from Russia, and on Wednesday, he warned of “severe consequences” if Moscow does not agree to a peace deal.

Any such pact, however, remains unlikely in the short run, as this summit made clear. Few diplomats—and more importantly, Zelensky and his top officials—believe that Putin will long observe a cease-fire without securing a permanent grant of Ukrainian territory. And that is a concession Zelensky says he is not willing to make, especially without some guarantee of NATO membership or a backup by U.S. or European security forces. Since before he was elected a second time, Trump has suggested that he will not accept Ukraine into NATO.

The ongoing war has put almost everything else in the Western Hemisphere on hold—in particular, any prospect of renewed strategic arms talks between Washington and Moscow. This comes at a time when both sides are modernizing their nuclear arsenals; developing much more sophisticated weapons, such as hypersonic missiles; and integrating artificial intelligence into increasingly autonomous systems with little or no regulation.

As president, Trump has occasionally walked away from what he deemed a bad deal. He did so in his first term after repeatedly wooing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, only to depart their summit in Hanoi in February 2019 without even a partial deal to dismantle Pyongyang’s nuclear arms program.

“Basically, they wanted the sanctions lifted, in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” Trump said at the time. “They were willing to denuke a large portion of the areas that we wanted, but we couldn’t give up all of the sanctions for that. … We had to walk away from that particular suggestion.”

But successful diplomacy of any kind requires some kind of high-stakes compromise. And very often success is a long-term project that only follows initial failure—as seen in previous presidential summiteering. At the Camp David talks between Israelis and Palestinians orchestrated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1978, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat actually threatened to pack his bags to leave several times, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin stopped talking to the president before Carter managed to barely rescue a deal. In 1905, U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt managed to break through a seemingly insurmountable impasse in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the eleventh hour in resolving the Russo-Japanese War—for which Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year later.

And despite mixed signals from his administration over how long it wants to stay involved in the Ukraine-Russia conflict—on the 2024 campaign trail, Trump used to say he’d resolve it in 24 hours, only to repeatedly express frustration with both Putin and Zelensky after he took office—Trump has referred to himself as a “peacemaker” who has openly coveted the Nobel Prize.

“I’ve solved six wars in the last six months, a little more than six months now, and I’m very proud of it,” Trump said Thursday in the Oval Office.

The Alaska summit did not help his cause.