Önder Özar Diplomasi Sevgisi: The Washington Post Opinion Max Boot The Trump-Putin summit wasn’t a disaster, but it was a U.S. defeat Vladimir Putin walked away the victor in his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska. August 16, 2025 at 8:47 a.m. EDTYesterday at 8:47 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post

Opinion

Max Boot

The Trump-Putin summit wasn’t a disaster, but it was a U.S. defeat

Vladimir Putin walked away the victor in his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska.

August 16, 2025 at 8:47 a.m. EDTYesterday at 8:47 a.m. EDT

5 min

Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Donald Trump shake hands in Alaska on Aug. 15. (Sergei Bulkin/AP)

U.S. leaders and their Soviet or Russian counterparts have met many times in the more than eight decades since Franklin D. Roosevelt journeyed to Tehran in 1943 for a summit with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. The Friday meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska was far from the worst. But it wasn’t good, either, except from the Kremlin’s vantage point.

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It was not Yalta (1945), where Roosevelt and Churchill handed over Eastern Europe to Soviet domination (albeit with little choice in the matter). It was not Vienna (1961), where Nikita Khrushchev was so unimpressed by the young U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, that he was emboldened to build a wall across Berlin and place nuclear missiles in Cuba. It was not even Helsinki (2018), where Trump humiliated himself and his country by accepting Putin’s assurances that Russia had not meddled in the 2016 election over the findings of the U.S. intelligence that it had.

The best thing you can say about the Alaska summit is that it could have been worse. Trump did not publicly endorse Putin’s demand that Ukraine hand over more territory to Russia in return for a ceasefire (although apparently he told European leaders that this would be the fastest path to peace). Nor was there any deal to relax U.S. sanctions on Russia. If Trump had made concessions on that scale, the Alaska summit would have been remembered as another Yalta.

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But, if Alaska was not a disaster, it was definitely a defeat. Putin walked away the clear winner from his latest encounter with an American president.

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Putin’s triumph was evident from the very start of the gathering at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson where U.S. troops literally rolled out the red carpet for a dictator, indicted as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court in 2023, who cannot risk journeying to most countries for fear of being arrested. Trump looked positively giddy as he welcomed Putin with a big smile and a handshake and then treated him to a ride in the presidential limousine — a beast inside “the beast.” Several hours later, the two men emerged from their meeting with aides for a joint news conference.

No deal was announced, but the two leaders heaped praise on each other. Putin flattered his counterpart by insisting that he would never have invaded Ukraine if Trump were president. (Why, then, has Putin more than doubled drone and missile strikes since Trump was inaugurated?) Trump looked subdued but nevertheless gushed over Putin: “Thank you very much, Mr. President, that was very profound, and I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting.” Trump went on to say, mysteriously, “There were many, many points that we agreed on … a couple of big ones that we haven’t quite gotten there.”

In the hours after the summit, it became clear that one of the “big” points on which there was no agreement was a ceasefire for Ukraine. In the days leading up to the hastily convened summit, Trump had threatened Putin with “very severe consequences” if he did not stop his attacks on Ukraine, and on the flight to Alaska Trump told Fox News, “I won’t be happy if I walk away without some form of a ceasefire.”

Well, there was no ceasefire — but also no consequences. In a post-summit interview with Fox, Trump said he would hold off imposing new sanctions because “the meeting went very well.” And then, in the middle of the night, Trump revealed on social media that he had dropped his demand for a ceasefire and had agreed with Putin to go straight to negotiating “a Peace Agreement, which would end the war.”

Trump thereby took the pressure off Putin to stop his vicious attacks against Ukraine. As Putin made clear in the news conference, he has not budged from his demand that any peace agreement must address “the primary causes of that conflict.” Of course, from Putin’s perspective, the primary cause of the conflict is Ukraine’s insistence on becoming a pro-Western democracy that does not take orders from the Kremlin.

Thus, Putin has managed to play yet another U.S. president for a sucker. This has been a pattern ever since his first meeting with George W. Bush in Slovenia in 2001, when, at the post-summit news conference, Bush memorably said that he had looked Putin in the eye, got “a sense of his soul,” and “found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.” John McCain later quipped: “I looked in Mr. Putin’s eyes and I saw three letters — a K, a G, and a B.”

Indeed, Putin has become expert at using his KGB training and his native guile to manipulate his gullible American counterparts. In his post-summit interview on Friday, Trump revealed that the Russian dictator had even told him that he won the 2020 election and that the election “was rigged because you have mail-in voting.” The only thing more ridiculous than imagining that Putin (whose primary rival died in prison) is an expert on election integrity is to imagine that Putin has any “brotherly” affection for the people of Ukraine, as he claimed in the post-summit news conference.

Given Trump’s incoherent approach to the war in Ukraine, it is too soon to despair. Trump hinted to European leaders after the summit that he would be willing to extend a U.S. security guarantee to Ukraine as part of a peace settlement. If true, that would be a significant win for Kyiv. Trump is often influenced by the last person he talked to, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is coming to Washington on Monday.

Let’s hope that the next Trump-Zelensky meeting at the White House will be less tumultuous than the last one, which ended in a shouting match. But it’s unlikely to be as friendly as the Trump-Putin meet-ups.

What readers are saying

The comments overwhelmingly view the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska as a disaster and a defeat for the U.S., with many expressing concern over Trump's handling of the situation. Commenters criticize Trump's negotiation skills, suggesting he was unprepared and easily manipulated by... Show more

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By Max Boot

Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend," which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.

Önder Özar Diplomasi Sevgisi

Saturday, August 16, 2025

The Washington Post Opinion Max Boot The Trump-Putin summit wasn’t a disaster, but it was a U.S. defeat Vladimir Putin walked away the victor in his meeting with Donald Trump in Alaska. August 16, 2025 at 8:47 a.m. EDTYesterday at 8:47 a.m. EDT

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