Anchorage: Trump Had No Cards to Play

Other than temporarily taking the Epstein scandal out of the headlines and providing Vladimir Putin with an opportunity to remind the Felon of the kompromat that Putin likely has on the Felon, the Russia-U.S. Summit in Anchorage accomplished nothing other than putting American weakness on display. Perhaps the only thing that relieved many was that the Felon did not channel Neville Chamberlain and hand Ukraine over on a silver platter. Sadly, that attempt may happen on Monday when the Felon meets with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and leaders from Europe - something I and others hope Ukraine and the Europeans reject completely.  That the Felon has no cards to play against Putin is in large part do to the Felon's own doing as he has (i) gutted military and intelligence agency of competent officials and replaced them with incompetent ideologues and boot licking sycophants, and (ii) failed to continue to arm Ukraine. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon's position of weakness and how Putin, an indicted war criminal, turned the disgraceful summit into a triumph while making the Felon appear hapless and weak.  Here are column highlights:

President Donald Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. He allowed the Pentagon twice to halt prearranged military shipments to Ukraine. He promised that when the current tranche of armaments runs out, there will be no more. He has cut or threatened to cut the U.S. funds that previously supported independent Russian-language media and opposition. His administration is slowly, quietly easing sanctions on Russia, ending “basic sanctions and export control actions that had maintained and increased U.S. pressure,” according to a Senate-minority report. “Every month he’s spent in office without action has strengthened Putin’s hand, weakened ours and undermined Ukraine’s own efforts to bring an end to the war,” Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Elizabeth Warren wrote in a joint statement.

Many of these changes have gone almost unremarked on in the United States. But they are widely known in Russia. The administration’s attacks on Zelensky, Europeans, and Voice of America have been celebrated on Russian television. Of course Vladimir Putin knows about the slow lifting of sanctions. As a result, the Russian president has clearly made a calculation: Trump, to use the language he once hurled at Zelensky, has no cards.

Trump does say that he wants to end the war in Ukraine, and sometimes he also says that he is angry that Putin doesn’t. But if the U.S. is not willing to use any economic, military, or political tools to help Ukraine, if Trump will not put any diplomatic pressure on Putin or any new sanctions on Russian resources, then the U.S. president’s fond wish to be seen as a peacemaker can be safely ignored.

There is not much else to say about yesterday’s Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, other than to observe the intertwining elements of tragedy and farce. It was embarrassing for Americans to welcome a notorious wanted war criminal on their territory. It was humiliating to watch an American president act like a happy puppy upon encountering the dictator of a much poorer, much less important state, treating him as a superior. It’s excruciating to imagine how badly Trump’s diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, an amateur out of his depth, misunderstood his last meeting with Putin in Moscow if he thought that the Alaska summit was going to be successful. It’s ominous that Trump now says he doesn’t want to push for a cease-fire but instead for peace negotiations, because the latter formula gives Putin time to keep killing Ukrainians.

Anchorage will probably not be remembered as one of history’s crime scenes, a new Munich Conference, or a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. But that’s a very low bar to reach.

The better way to understand Anchorage is not as the start of something new, but as the culmination of a longer process. As the U.S. dismantles its foreign-policy tools, as this administration fires the people who know how to use them, our ability to act with any agility will diminish. From the Treasury Department to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, from the State Department to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, agency after agency is being undermined, deliberately or accidentally, by political appointees who are unqualified, craven, or hostile to their own mission.

The U.S. has no cards because we’ve been giving them away. If we ever want to play them again, we will have to win them back: Arm Ukraine, expand sanctions, stop the lethal drone swarms, break the Russian economy, and win the war. Then there will be peace.