The Alaska summit was a great success for Vladimir Putin and for Donald Trump’s love of theater, but a potential disaster for Ukraine and Europe. The most obvious feature was that Russia made no commitment to a ceasefire. But the most important was that America put no pressure at all on Russia to end the war, despite Trump having promised Europe that he would do so.
It is true that few details have been revealed about what was discussed, still less agreed, between the Russian dictator and the American president, although some have leaked, confirming Europeans’ worst fears about Putin’s demands and about Trump’s unwillingness to challenge him. More will doubtless emerge when Ukraine’s President Volodymr Zelenskyy flies to Washington on Monday to meet Trump, and from conversations both men have with European leaders. Yet meanwhile we should reflect carefully and soberly on two revealing and menacing vignettes from the summit.
The first was the arrival on American soil of Russia’s long-serving foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, wearing a sweatshirt bearing the Cyrillic initials CCCP, which stood historically for the USSR. This was a brazen televisual means to assert that Russia still intends to rebuild the empire that was lost when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Russia is undaunted, consistent and, by this symbolic moment of triumph in the former Russian imperial territory of Alaska, emboldened.
The second vignette came in the one media interview Trump gave after the summit, to his sycophantic Fox News friend, Sean Hannity. In that interview, Trump put the onus back on Ukraine to make peace and exposed his true view of the conflict by emphasising that the Ukrainians are a small country facing what he called Russia’s “war machine.” Zelenskyy would be wise to capitulate now, was the implication, and America is not going to do anything serious to help it.
What these vignettes also reveal is that Putin and Trump share a view of the world as consisting of a lot of weak countries but of three superpowers, to which special rules apply. It is the world as described more than two millennia ago by the Greek historian Thucydides, in which “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”
While such realpolitik never completely went away, the whole point of the United Nations Charter of 1945, the body of international law which followed and the collective efforts of the West was to constrain the use of military power and to protect smaller countries against bigger ones. Trump has now confirmed, for anyone who had yet to realize it, that he is a great-power guy, and one who thinks that great powers should treat each other with a special respect. For him, the West is dead.
Ukraine, along with others on Europe’s frontline such as Poland, the Baltic States and Finland, was already well aware of Russia’s imperial ambitions and of Trump’s contemptuous view of smaller countries.
However, for the two other groups that are still capable of exerting pressure on Trump and on the Ukraine war, the Alaska summit could prove to be a valuable wake-up call. Those two groups are Trump’s own Republican supporters in the US Congress and the leaders of Europe’s most powerful countries: Germany, France, Italy and Britain.
Out of a mixture of loyalty and fear, the Republicans in Congress who care about Ukraine have up until now given Trump the benefit of the doubt. In the weeks before the summit, they chose to believe him when he threatened Russia with “severe consequences” if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire. Now, unless information quickly emerges showing that Trump has in fact made new and credible threats privately to Putin, they are going to have to choose whether to speak out or to stay silent.
The initial reaction from Republicans in Washington to the news from Alaska was quite negative. Their dismal record during Trump’s so-far seven months in office nonetheless suggests they will soon quieten down. But with Trump’s own poll ratings looking weak and next year’s mid-term congressional elections on the horizon, there is a small chance that some might feel brave enough to stand up for Ukraine and to lobby him hard in the only place he really cares about, the United States itself.
That said, the greater hope lies, as always, in Europe. For months now the main European strategy has been to try to persuade Trump to put pressure on Putin, while militaries make plans for how to give Ukraine security guarantees to reinforce a ceasefire once one has been agreed. They adopted this strategy because of their own military weakness, and paid a big price for it by meekly accepting the tariffs Trump imposed on the European Union and the United Kingdom rather than seeking to fight back by threatening trade retaliation.
They will now have to decide whether this strategy has definitively failed. The cowardly but politically tempting option will be to say that the strategy needs to be given more time. Yet Trump himself, in his Hannity interview and in other remarks, has essentially indicated that this strategy has failed. He has continued to hint that he thinks Ukraine will have to cede more territory to Russia, which both Ukraine and the European leaders have rightly said is a non-starter.
It really is time for the Europeans to take over the leading role in strengthening Ukraine’s bargaining position and in forcing Russia to bring this war to an end. Doing so will be hard, for the Europeans’ weakness is sadly genuine. Yet they do have tools at their disposal, if only they could muster the political courage to deploy them.
Above all, Europe needs to show that it is willing to hurt Russia. The best way to do that would be to confiscate the estimated €200 billion of Russian central bank reserves that have been frozen in EU bank accounts for the past three years, and hand the funds to Ukraine. Doing so would grab Putin’s attention and might even impress the highly transactional Trump.
At the same time, Germany could start supplying Ukraine with its ample stock of long-range Taurus missiles, to take the place of the weapons America is no longer sending. All could send more missile defense systems and shorter-range missiles, even at the cost of leaving themselves vulnerable in the short term.
The willingness to take such risks and to call opponents’ bluff is one of the things that marks out a strong country from a weak one, and a political leader who has values from one who has none. For goodness sake stand up, Europe, before it is too late.
Formerly editor-in-chief of The Economist, Bill Emmott is currently chairman of the Japan Society of the UK, the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the International Trade Institute.
First published on his Substack, Bill Emmott’s Global View, this is the English original of an article published on August 17 in Italian by La Stampa. It is republished here with kind permission.
