The Russians embarrassed Joe Biden in 2021, Ronald Reagan in 1986, and JFK in 1961. Will things turn out differently this year with Trump?
The White House confirmed on Tuesday that President Trump will travel to Anchorage on Friday for what may be a fateful summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. If the history of similar summits is any guide, the enterprise is a fraught one and has a habit of backfiring.
At some level, the fact that there is a summit at all, much less on U.S. soil, represents a victory for Putin. His regime will claim that it represents the end of Russia’s diplomatic isolation, even as the war that precipitated it continues. That’s no small concession. Russian markets tend to do quite well amid indications that Moscow’s economic segregation is coming to an end, and that capital generation undermines the sanctions regime.
The Russians are telegraphing their strategy ahead of the meeting, which will consist of lavishing Trump with praise and cajoling him with the promise of deals for joint infrastructure projects in the Arctic and the like. All they want in exchange is for Ukraine to surrender vast swaths of unoccupied territory, including major industrial towns and cities, and to ratify the legitimacy of Russia’s previous conquests. Putin will likely accept something short of that if it leaves Ukraine vulnerable to internal subversion and, eventually, a third invasion.
We know what Trump’s goal for this summit is: peace, or something he can plausibly call peace. It’s unclear what tactics he will deploy in the pursuit of that goal, but there is an imbalance of objectives that favors Russia. Moscow is not suing for peace, nor is Kyiv. It’s Trump who has that goal in mind, and it is he who is putting that ask to Putin. The Kremlin’s acquiescence will come at a cost.
This imbalance has scuttled similar summits before, dealing a blow to the reputation of the president who was naïve enough to grant Moscow that kind of platform.
The Russians embarrassed Joe Biden at Geneva in 2021. Putin’s regime had spent the better part of the year amassing a menacing military presence along Ukraine’s border, and Biden seemed to think he could talk Putin out of it. “I think the last thing he wants now is a cold war,” Biden said of his Russian counterpart. But an indirect conflict with Russia is exactly what he got just four months later.
The Russians embarrassed Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik in 1986. It was supposed to be a prelude to a U.S.-Soviet meeting in Washington, D.C., but the talks collapsed, leading Secretary of State George P. Shultz to lament how “deeply disappointed” he was that such a prospect was no longer viable. Reagan had hoped to cement a sweeping arms control agreement to which Mikhail Gorbachev appeared amenable. But the Soviet delegation made a “last-minute qualification” in the form of the demand that the U.S. abandon research into missile defense technology — research the Soviets could not match. Reagan balked, and the summit collapsed. The president deserves credit for cutting bait, and missile defense technology eventually caught up with his imagination. But at the time, and for decades after, the conventional wisdom maintained that Reagan’s idealism had scuttled the prospects for real arms control with the Soviets.
The Russians also embarrassed John F. Kennedy at Vienna in 1961. The young president sought to set the tone for his relations with Moscow early in his presidency by having an “informal exchange of views,” but the agenda sprawled. The intractable “Berlin question,” the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, and America’s growing military involvement in Southeast Asia loomed large. Kennedy allowed himself to get drawn into a protracted and abstract debate with Nikita Khrushchev over Soviet doctrine, Marxist dogma, and the postwar status of the U.K.’s territorial possessions. “To the horror of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff,” history writer Becky Little observed, “Kennedy told the premier he considered Sino-Soviet forces and U.S.-Western European forces to be fairly equally balanced.” Khrushchev made the most of Kennedy’s admission that NATO was all but checked by the communist world’s military parity. Months later, he would bifurcate Berlin. A year later, he would introduce offensive nuclear weapons into Cuba. The Vienna summit, Kennedy later confessed, was the “worst thing in my life.”
Maybe the Anchorage Summit of 2025 will not be remembered as a prelude to disaster or even political disgrace. But Putin’s future actions may ensure that the summit is remembered as an embarrassment for the American president. These events have a long fuse on them, after all.