There is nobody with more confidence in President Trump’s deal-making abilities than Trump himself.
Yet, as his Friday meeting in Alaska with President Vladimir Putin of Russia draws near, he and his top aides are lowering expectations, suggesting it’s not Trump’s job to make peace between Moscow and Ukraine and calling the summit little more than a “listening exercise.”
Statements like that belie the enormous stakes of the first meeting between Trump and Putin since the Russian invasion, particularly for the parties who aren’t expected to be present, which includes the leadership of Ukraine and of the European nations that have been living with the war on their doorstep. For Trump, though, the motivation is personal — it’s a chance to reset a relationship he has long boasted about but has lately become rocky, while bringing his personal brand of deal-making to the world’s biggest stage.
There’s a lot going on here. So I called David Sanger, who has covered the White House and national security for decades and who has written books about superpower conflict, before he boarded a series of flights to Anchorage earlier today.
He walked me through the calculus of risk and reward around this meeting — and why Putin can claim a modest win before it even starts.
As you’ve written, it used to be normal for an American president to meet with the Russian leader. George W. Bush met with Putin roughly two dozen times. Joe Biden met him only once, in 2021. But Trump’s meeting will be the first for an American president since the Western world isolated Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. What does he stand to gain from it?
Trump sees himself as a peacemaker, and this is tied up very much in his oft-expressed desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize, which he usually combines with some kind of comment to suggest that the Nobel Committee would never give it to him.
He has taken credit for a cease-fire between India and Pakistan, although the Indians have a different version of that story. He took a direct role in a peace pledge signed between Armenia and Azerbaijan, at the White House, and there have been other regional conflicts in which he’s played an important role. The big ones, though, have evaded him.
Those, of course, are the Israel-Hamas war and the Russian war with Ukraine, which he famously declared that he would solve in 24 hours, on the basis of his long and, in his view, respectful relationship with Putin. He has now come to question whether that relationship is what he thought it was, or at least what he portrayed it as, because Putin has held a series of perfectly friendly, constructive phone calls with him and then continued on the same battle plan that he was on before, with considerable recent success.
If the president comes out of Alaska without an immediate or imminent cease-fire plan, I think it’s going to be difficult for him to portray this as a win. But a cease-fire alone won’t be enough.
Who has the most at stake here?
The country with the most at stake, of course, is Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who wasn’t invited. The second-most at stake is President Trump and the countries that make up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO. Let me explain.
For Ukraine, the risk is that Trump will push for something he’s been referring to as a “land swap.” He doesn’t say that Russia would simply get the land that it has already taken militarily, which would be problematic enough, because it would reward Moscow and Putin for invading a sovereign state.
Trump’s use of the phrase “swaps” leaves you with the impression that he might be willing to award the Russians territory that they have not gained militarily, in return for something else.
Tell us about the risks for Trump.
The big risk for Trump is that whatever comes out of Alaska is just a delaying action. Putin may calculate that what he needs most is a relaxation of sanctions, a reopening of trade and time to rebuild his force so that a few years from now, he can attempt a re-invasion of the rest of Ukraine and use the territory he’s gained as a launchpad to drive toward Kyiv. That’s a huge risk, and the Ukrainians are rightly worried about it.
To forestall that, the Europeans and Zelensky are insisting on security guarantees and continued arms shipments to Ukraine, as well as making sure that Trump doesn’t make any concessions about where NATO forces can be deployed in Eastern Europe. All of those issues are as important — and over the long term, perhaps more important — than where you draw the boundaries between Russia and Ukraine.
And there’s one more risk for NATO. Will Putin use this meeting to drive a wedge between Trump and the NATO allies? That is Putin’s greatest dream.
The person who has the least to lose from this meeting, it seems, is Putin himself. What might he be trying to extract?
Putin has something of a victory just the moment that he lands in Alaska, because it’s the end of his isolation by the West.
He’s most certainly thinking about ways to raise topics that will distract Trump from the war in Ukraine. He’s bringing a business delegation, and while we don’t know what they are prepared to discuss, there’s no better way to get Trump’s attention than wave a big possible investment deal, particularly for critical minerals or rare earths that would make the U.S. less dependent on China.
There’s also the possibility that Putin will offer up some kind of informal agreement to extend the last major bilateral arms control treaty between Russia and the United States, which expires early next year. That could allow Trump, who is very sensitive on nuclear issues, to walk away claiming a win.
For Trump, this exercise is about him saving face over his up-and-down relationship with Putin. It’s about burnishing his credentials as a peacemaker. It’s about making himself look good. And yet it comes with great, great geopolitical risk for traditional American allies.
It does. And a lesson that we learned from the first Trump term is that the president tends to go into these meetings under prepared and overly confident in his ability to use the force of personality to win the day.
Let’s think of the biggest example in the first term. It was his personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. But where are we now? The two leaders embraced each other and exchanged lovely letters, but never reached a nuclear agreement. North Korea has more nuclear weapons today than it ever had, by far, during Trump’s first term.
Just because you’re holding the meeting and all the cameras are there and handshakes and hugs are happening does not necessarily mean that you are changing the directional arrow of world events.
Is that the best that Europe and Ukraine can hope for here? That this meeting doesn’t make anything worse for them — it just doesn’t do anything at all?
“First do no harm” is not only a medical phrase. It’s also true in the science of — and art of — geopolitics.
Our conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.
IN HIS WORDS
Trump reflects on his ‘crime free’ promise
President Trump has taken ownership of ridding Washington of crime — and today seemed to acknowledge the inherent political challenge of doing so. My colleague Minho Kim explains.
After deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and seizing control of its local police force, Trump vowed during remarks at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday that the city would be “crime free” in the “coming months.”
That will be a hard promise to keep. One of the safest cities in the country, Campton Hills, Ill., for example, still reports some crime. And so at the same time, a president who embraces hyperbole — and tries to dodge unfavorable data — seemed to acknowledge that tall order.
“It’s a big statement,” he said. “If one person gets a little injured by somebody, they’ll say Trump did not fulfill this.”
Trump told Pam Bondi, his attorney general, that she’d “better be good” and help him avoid criticisms by not flunking on the difficult goal of achieving zero crime.
BY THE NUMBERS
616
That’s the number of grants for research projects addressing health disparities that the National Institutes of Health had terminated as of mid-June, according to an analysis by my colleagues Roni Caryn Rabin and Irena Hwang.
The N.I.H. had originally earmarked about $407 million in funding for the projects, which focused on closing gaps between Black and white, and rich and poor, Americans. Forty percent of those grants have since been reinstated, most because of a federal judge’s orders, my colleagues reported. But the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to allow many of the cancellations to proceed.
The rollbacks represent a seismic shift for health scientists and the hobbling of a long campaign to unravel the causes of poor health in minority communities, low-income and rural areas. Even critics who have long derided scientists and universities for liberal bias wonder if the Trump administration’s cuts have gone too far.
ONE LAST THING
Tracking a cultural takeover
I wrote last week about how, in a break with small-government conservatism, Trump is extending the power of the federal government into new areas of American life. A couple of stories this week show how he’s moving to exert his influence over arts and culture, too.
On Tuesday, the White House announced it would undertake a comprehensive review of all of the current and planned exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institutions “to assess tone, historical framing and alignment with American ideals.” The 21 museums of the Smithsonian had traditionally operated independently of the executive branch.
Today, Trump affirmed his growing influence over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, where he has named himself chair. He announced the institution’s new class of honorees, which he suggested he had approved himself, saying he rejected several prospective people who he called “wokesters.”
Jacob Reber and Minho Kim contributed to this newsletter.