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As the Trump administration engages in much-needed talks with the Russian Federation over the fate of Ukraine, it’s important to take stock of just what is at stake in these negotiations. This isn’t just about ending the most unnecessary war the United States has been involved in since the Iraq War. It’s about reestablishing great power relations with nuclear-armed, resource-rich Russia. 

Writing more than a century ago, a British geopolitical theorist, Sir Halford Mackinder, identified Russia as the “geographical pivot” around which the entire World Island (the most populous contiguous landmass in the world, encompassing Europe, Asia, and Africa) spins. 

For Mackinder, Russia’s power rested in the fact that it was essentially a landlocked country. He identified Russia as sitting within the “Heartland” of Eurasia. Because it was mostly inaccessible to nations that were sea powers, such as the British Empire in Mackinder’s day or the United States today, Mackinder theorized that Russia held the key to dominating the world. Mackinder’s theory arose during the age when railway travel had become ubiquitous, and it was seen as delivering a decisive shift away from sea powers to land powers, such as Russia.

In today’s world, land-based trading routes across Eurasia are again becoming an important element that all the great powers are fixating on. This makes Mackinderian theory all the more prevalent. In Mackinder’s postulation, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World!” 

The Heartland—Russia—is the key to the geopolitics of the World Island. Today, most of America’s foreign-policy concerns are to be found in and around the World Island. And in every problem afflicting U.S. foreign policy, Russia has a pivotal role. 

While the neoconservative-neoliberal claque who purport to rule over us—the Blob—believe the solution is to isolate and contain the Russian Federation (or make war upon it via proxies, like Ukraine), this is a failed policy. In fact, the failure of this policy is self-evident to just about everyone outside the Blob. 

Need to stabilize the Middle East? Russia can help the United States with that. Want to have better relations with India? Russia would be a perfect middleman. Do you need access to cheap, massive amounts of energy and rare earth minerals? Russia has those. Worried about North Korea’s nuclear weapons threat? Russia has leverage. 

Here’s the biggest one: Washington wants to contain China’s seemingly inexorable rise. Well, guess what? Russia is possibly the single most important potential player in that game. 

But the Blob has done everything in its power to alienate and attack the Russians. For 30 years, it has ignored one of the foundational principles of modern geopolitical theory in service to some half-baked ideological notion that Russia represents an existential threat to human rights and democracy. 

Of course, little is said about the ongoing list of human-rights violations and undemocratic regimes that the Blob has supported these last 30 years around the world. 

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Russia has an estimated 3.8 million metric tons of rare earth mineral reserves. In other words, Russia ranks fifth globally in terms of rare earth mineral reserves. It is still behind China’s 44 million metric tons. 

But, when developed and sold on the global market, it would make Russia into a key economic partner for the United States and the West. The U.S. itself has some 3.6 million tons of rare earth minerals, although recent research has found that millions of tons more may be extracted from American coal ash. Combined with rare earth minerals produced by friendly nations, such as Japan and Australia, the United States could believably divorce itself from reliance on Chinese rare earths over time.

China has so far thwarted the Trump administration in the trade war precisely because of Beijing’s vise-like grip on the world’s rare earth mineral market. Integrating Russian sources would help to ameliorate America’s dependence on Chinese rare earths. 

And it isn’t only rare earth mineral development where the U.S. and Russia could cooperate in a post–Ukraine War environment. The Trump administration has successfully begun mediating a peace deal between Azerbaijan and Armenia. This is but the first step toward the creation of the Zangezur corridor, which is designed to move energy and goods from eastern Eurasia to western Eurasia along a U.S.-Turkish-Israeli–dominated trading route without cutting through Iranian territory. This would both harm Iran’s economy and weaken China’s hold on Eurasian trade.

But the wildcard remains Russia. A smart play following a potential peace deal over Ukraine would be for the Trump administration to give the Russians a cut of the Zangezur corridor deal. This would effectively flip Russia out of China’s camp and more toward the U.S.-led camp. 

Meanwhile, in the Mideast, Russia can help the Americans bring a modicum of balance and peace to the war-torn region. With Russia’s leverage over nations such as the Islamic Republic of Iran, Washington and Moscow could coordinate their respective regional partners and create a new, peaceful balance of power in the Mideast that ends the ongoing tensions and allows for the United States to focus on more important strategic domains. After all, the United States and Russia share a common enemy in the form of Islamic terrorism. 

As for the biggest geopolitical issue facing the United States, the rise of China, Russia is the obvious component needed for a successful containment strategy. The notion that Russia wants to be a permanent ally of China is ridiculous. They need China’s support because the Ukraine War has forced them into bed with each other. 

But Putin knows his history. He understands that Russia’s Far East, one of the most resource-rich areas of the Russian Federation (albeit sparsely populated), is under constant threat of annexation in the long run by China. This is not something Putin desires to see in his lifetime. 

Ending the Ukraine War, embracing Russia as a viable trading partner, and working to enhance U.S.–Russian bilateral relations might be the key to containing China’s rise. After all, as a major nation that shares a land border with China—and a longer history of animosity than alliance—Russia is, in fact, more threatened by China’s rise than are the Americans who sit an ocean and a continent away.

If, however, the Trump administration fails to get a peace deal with Russia over Ukraine, none of these other possibilities for peace and prosperity will come to fruition. Instead, the state of U.S.–Russia relations could collapse into the “Cold Peace” that Boris Yeltsin warned us of in 1994.

Or, more frighteningly, the final offramp to a world war over Ukraine could be missed and the two nuclear-armed powers, the United States and Russia, could find themselves engaged in a nightmarish war in Europe. These are the stakes—and opportunities—that the Trump administration faces when they meet the Russians in Alaska. Failure to achieve peace means the greatest missed opportunity diplomatically for the United States and Russia since the end of the Cold War, when the future looked so bright, only to become so dreadfully dark.