What will happen in Alaska?

“Alaska,” said the mountaineer Jon Krakauer, “is a place that constantly reminds you of just how small you are in the grand scheme of things.” I doubt somehow that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump will echo that sentiment when they meet tomorrow in the Last Frontier to carve up the future between themselves – Plumb-Pudding-in-Danger-style. The two leaders will have each traveled some eight hours over their own mighty lands to see each other. It will be a case of today, Ukraine; tomorrow, ze world. 

Yesterday, the Trump administration went to great lengths to assure nervous European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Trump would not, in their absence, simply roll over for Putin. There would be “severe consequences” for Russia, said America’s Commander-in-Chief at the Kennedy Center last night, if Moscow did not agree to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump wants his meeting with Putin to “lay the table” for a tri-lateral with Zelensky. 

Zelensky had said that “substantive and productive talks about us, without us, will not work.” So Trump struck an unusually humble note. He said that if tomorrow’s summit “goes ok, we’ll have a quick second one… between President Putin and President Zelensky and myself, if they’d like to have me there.”

But in European capitals, and among the Atlanticist foreign-policy blob, the anxiety about the Trump-Putin summit goes beyond the possibility of disadvantageous land swaps in the Donbas. The fear is that Putin will cannily offer Trump some groundbreaking energy-and-investment deal, some ice-breaking Arctic Accord that resets US-Russia relations on a better footing. It’s worth noting that Putin will be accompanied by his special envoy Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, so we can perhaps expect talk of trillion-dollar schemes to bring the two great nations together.

Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s right-wing philosopher, who lost his daughter to a car bomb in 2022, said yesterday on X: “The real success of Alaska will be if Trump and Putin don’t mention Ukraine at all. There are so many other important issues.”

Dugin, who sees Russia’s role in the world as being the defender of Christian values against Satanic forces, added that the “Deep State” – by which he means the forces of western liberal internationalism – “now controls Trump too openly and too brutally. But Trump doesn’t like to be controlled. So Alaska is the opportunity to restore the balance.”

This is almost certainly how Putin will approach tomorrow’s negotiations. He will praise Trump for being strong enough to resist the NATO warmongers in his midst and bold enough to begin a new divinely ordained alliance between “Daddy Trump” and Mother Russia. 

It is, of course, wildly unrealistic to expect Trump and Putin to not mention Ukraine. Trump wants the three-way meeting in order to make good on his campaign promise to achieve peace. How on Earth that might work is another matter. The Times yesterday reported that the compromise on offer was for a Russian-style occupation of Ukrainian land modeled on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank (because, er, look at how happily that region is getting along). The White House said the Times’s scoop was “total fake news and sloppy reporting… Nothing of the sort was discussed with anyone at any point.” Clearly, however, Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff, who visited Moscow last week, agreed something with Russian officials before the Alaska summit was announced. The question for tomorrow is: will we find out what?