The highly anticipated and hastily arranged Alaska summit was never likely to mirror the map-redrawing summit of Yalta, where Joseph Stalin cajoled — some would say coerced — a physically ill and mentally exhausted Franklin Roosevelt and a grumbling Winston Churchill to carve up Europe between Western and Soviet spheres.
Nor was it going to be a breakthrough summit like Reykjavik, where in 1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev laid the groundwork for future nuclear arms control, adding to the thawing of the Cold War.
Gorbachev, of course, was trying to manage a graceful dissolution of the Soviet Union; Putin is intent on resurrecting the empire.
But according to seasoned observers, from Fiona Hill, Trump’s former Russia czar, to Michael Carpenter, a former senior director for Europe in the National Security Council under President Joe Biden, the Alaska confab was a mistake.
“The summit legitimized him on the world stage,” Carpenter said.
And not only on the world stage. Certainly, the Kremlin and Russia’s state-directed media has been busy portraying the summit as less about Ukraine and more about Putin and Trump, leaders of the great powers, sitting together to decide the shape of the global future. Ahead of the summit, Putin also got an American endorsement of the idea of Ukraine trading land for peace, loading the dice against Kyiv.