Posturing over peace: What Trump and Putin’s meeting was really about

Friday’s summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin came together with all the finesse that we’ve come to expect from the US president and his administration.

The pomp kicked off with Putin, a man who orders the bombing of Ukrainian cities every night, stepping onto a red carpet at an Alaskan air base that largely exists to keep an eye on his country.

Historically, teams from the White House spend weeks or months putting these kinds of meetings together. There are extensive security checks, detailed agendas and countless negotiations about the optics and curation to ensure that no one gets the upper hand. When I worked at the White House, I was part of the team that planned the 2023 meeting between US president Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, which took months of detailed work.

Yet this summit came about over the course of a couple of days. After Trump announced a unilateral ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, Putin shelled Kyiv to demonstrate how little the words of a foreign leader mean to him. I was in Kyiv that night, watching the drones and missiles strike civilian apartments – a brutal reminder of the human cost of Putin’s imperial ambitions.

The options for the summit’s location were limited due to Putin having an arrest warrant out against him from the International Criminal Court and Trump being a convicted felon. Few countries were willing to grant the meeting any diplomatic legitimacy, and many wouldn’t allow one or both leaders into the country at all.

And so that left Alaska, a former Russian territory purchased by the United States in 1867, at an air base built to monitor Russian airspace and its massive nuclear arsenal, and respond to threats coming from across the Pacific.

I’ve worked on plenty of stops at the Elmendorf-Richardson base. Usually, it is where a US official stops to refuel their plane on the way to a destination in Asia. It’s not typically the site of diplomatic negotiations.

And it showed. Though the tarmac photos were impressive, the pipe-and-drape walls around storage rooms gave the feel of an underfunded campaign stop in the last venue available in town.

But the point of this summit was never to resolve the war in Ukraine. Rather, it offered a convenient excuse for both presidents to play to their domestic audiences.

Putin is looking for a way to rehabilitate his own image. Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he has been shunned by most of the Western world. But now, thanks to Trump, he has footage that will play on Russian state media for weeks of him sitting next to an American president inside a US air base. His long-running project of being Russia’s new tsar is back on track; the images of his refreshed power are unmistakable.

For his part, Trump was looking to use the August congressional recess to re-engage his MAGA base and give them something to talk about other than the Epstein file scandal that won’t go away. The president is convinced of his abilities as a master dealmaker, and this provided an opportunity. But as soon as the summit was announced, the White House immediately began lowering expectations. It went from being the location where a peace deal in Ukraine would be hashed out to a “listening session”, to having a 25 per cent chance of failure, all the way to a series of statements with no questions from the media allowed.

Ultimately, only four people will ever know what was said between Trump and Putin – the two men and their translators. Though Trump appears not to have given away the farm on Ukraine, Putin offered no concessions. In that sense, the summit wasn’t a spectacular failure, but rather a fizzling out. Now Trump is reportedly pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to cede parts of his country in exchange for a fragile peace, which offers us a hint at what was discussed behind closed doors.

Trump’s recent purging of the National Security Council via Elon Musk’s mass public service cuts and the president’s installation of loyalists in key roles – including a Peter Thiel acolyte to run the NSC’s strategic planning – is further evidence that Trump believes foreign policy challenges are to be solved through his personal abilities rather than bureaucratic channels. But this meeting tells us the limits of that approach.

World leaders and intelligence services around the world will be desperate for information about what occurred in that meeting room over coming days and weeks.

What’s certain is that this summit was never about peace. It was the act of two men, each facing his own political pressures, using the image of diplomacy to project strength while knowing nothing would change for the people living and dying under Putin’s war.

Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne who is looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He previously served in the Biden-Harris administration for three years.