Summits have provided the Kremlin with a platform from which it has confused and embarrassed American presidents for decades.
The history of presidential summitry with the Russians and their Soviet predecessors is fraught, but only because Moscow likes it that way. Summits have provided the Kremlin with a platform from which it has confused and embarrassed American presidents for decades. The pattern is so consistent that it could only be deliberate and strategic. And it looks like they’ve done it again.
After the close of the Anchorage Summit, the Wall Street Journal’s reporting indicated that Trump thought he might have a breakthrough on his hands. “Putin accepted, Trump said, that any peace would need to include the presence of Western troops in Ukraine as a way of ensuring its durability, according to four of the officials,” the dispatch revealed. Yet, Trump noted that “Putin wouldn’t stop fighting during any peace talks,” and he “insisted Ukraine cede territory” to secure peace in our time.
Trump’s Chamberlin-esque formulation for a durable cease-fire was inauspicious, but the prospect of a European peacekeeping force on Ukrainian soil supported by the U.S. and even tacitly legitimized by the Kremlin’s acquiescence had promise. Extending NATO-style security guarantees to Ukraine while under-committing to that project would provide Russia with many opportunities to secure its ultimate objective: testing the Atlantic Alliance’s integrity with the goal of exposing its mutual-defense provisions as hollow and, thus, all but formally defunct. But if something approaching “Article V-like” security guarantees manifested in a visible and tangible defense architecture, including not just the provision of men and matériel to Ukraine but integrated command-and-control, it could deter future Russian aggression.
So, the West has pressed ahead. On Tuesday, the Financial Times outlined the details of what NATO-style security guarantees might look like, and they sound fairly robust. Senior U.S. officials “voiced in a flurry of meetings” their willingness “to contribute ‘strategic enablers’ including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), command and control, and air defense assets to enable any European-led deployment on the ground.” America’s “vastly superior” ISR capabilities would monitor activity along a frozen line of contact and coordinate Western forces in the region.
The proposition is, however, “contingent on commitments by European capitals to deploy tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine, the officials cautioned.” The FT was careful to note that the proposal “could still be rescinded,” but it “represents a significant shift” from the administration’s erstwhile hostility toward any direct U.S. involvement in a postwar settlement on Ukrainian soil.
Unsurprisingly, Russia is not as game for this proposal as either Putin let on or Trump and Steve Witkoff misheard. Either way, Moscow is playing bad cop.
“This line violates the principle of indivisible security and assigns Kyiv the role of a strategic provocateur on Russia’s borders,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. “Security guarantees must be based on reaching a common understanding that takes into account Russia’s security interests.” In the days since Anchorage, Russia has flat-out rejected the prospect of any Western security guarantees, insisted that the communist Chinese should take a leading role in postwar Ukraine, and floated a “non-aligned,” “non-nuclear” U.N.-style peacekeeping force.
This is not a Kremlin that doesn’t know its own mind. It is a Kremlin that is stalling for time as it continues to prosecute a war it has never tired of — a Moscow that has used the unrequited diplomatic gift Trump presented to Putin to convince Western dupes that the path to peace is open if Western leaders give up on their quaint attachment to a defensible and sovereign Ukraine.
In the days since, Russia has ramped up its attack not just on Ukraine’s civilian population centers but Kyiv’s Western allies. Russia targeted a U.S.-owned electronics manufacturer near Poland, a reprisal of its April attack on a Boeing plant outside Kyiv. It executed attacks on a Turkish drone factory. It has hit a European Union diplomatic mission and buildings used by the British Council, the U.K.’s cultural exchange outfit, killing 23, including four children. All this signaling is about as subtle as, well, an airstrike.
The Kremlin is conveying through the application of force that it will not guarantee the security of Western forces in Ukraine, compelling the NATO alliance to contemplate the full horror of what invoking “Article V-like” provisions would really look like.
The president has invested a significant amount of political capital in a peace process that was predicated on the aspirational hope that Putin could be persuaded to abandon his perceived strategic interests in Russia’s so-called “near abroad.” The self-described “realists” in the president’s orbit viewed the conflict through the lens of domestic politics, convincing themselves that the war was a byproduct of the policies backed by the people they hate, therefore wholly misreading the nature of the conflict.
In fact, the summit was the ultimate expression of a constructivist foreign policy — one predicated not on hard power but social interactions, mutual ideational affinities, and the notion that we can remake the world if we just choose the right words to describe it. It has been an embarrassing failure, but the president and his advisers are only partly to blame. From the Russian perspective, embarrassment was the whole point of this exercise.