Alaska summit will reveal extent Trump borrows from Putin playbook

The National

2 days ago

Trump's military takeover of the nation's capital, sending National Guard troops to Washington's streets and seizing control of the DC municipal police department, could have come straight from the Putin playbook.
It matters little that there is no crime wave 'emergency' as Trump says. In fact, Washington's crime rate has fallen in recent years with violent crime overall down 26% compared with this time a year ago.
It matters even less that in order to deploy the National Guard, Trump has invoked an obscure section of the 1973 DC Home Rule Act, which allows the president to take control of local law enforcement in the district for a period of one month.
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Back on January 6, 2021, Trump might have been relying on an incited mob of supporters to seize the Capitol building, but today, in an open show of power in his second term, he can use his presidential powers at will, it seems, to send out an unmistakeable message of his administration's willingness and capacity to wield power.
At every turn, Trump is expanding his control in a way that poses a real threat to America's democracy. Just take the press as an example.
As a report by the media watchdog the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recently identified, there are three ways in which the Trump administration is chipping away at US press freedom: by limiting access to information, instituting new regulations and targeting journalists and newsrooms with lawsuits and investigations. Or to put this another way, you are rewarded for the 'right' coverage and vilified if it doesn't fit with Trump's thinking.
As the CPJ also rightly points out, the fate of American democracy and journalists' ability to work without fear are intertwined. This threat to press freedom must then be seen as occurring in a larger context in which First Amendment rights more broadly are being eroded.
Which takes me back to the meeting between Trump and Putin tomorrow. For while America admittedly might still be a long way off being the equivalent of Putin's authoritarian Russia, Trump so far is making a good go at showing he is working off the same political page as his Kremlin pal.
What both leaders do domestically in political terms, of course, is one thing, but when it comes to imposing their will on another independent sovereign nation, that is something else again.
The news that this will be a one-on-one meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska and that neither of the two leaders will be flanked by their advisers has only added to the disquiet that between them they will come to a tawdry deal that will then effectively be imposed on Ukraine.
Trump as we know has form when it comes to striking ill-considered agreements with whoever gets into a room with him.
It's also a reminder of how autocrats often work, for when the tanks, troops or mobs can't get them what they covet in the first instance, too often shady deals with each other become an alternative.
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As Edward Luce, US national editor of the Financial Times, wryly put it a few days ago: 'The ghosts of Munich, Yalta and other sordid bargains ought to be stalking Alaska.'
For make no mistake, what happens in that room at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson military facility in Anchorage tomorrow is a profoundly crucial moment not just for Ukraine, but for Europe and its future relations with the Trump administration and the US generally.
If the intense diplomacy and virtual meetings between European leaders, Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Trump are anything to go by, then it's evident that every party realises that what comes out of tomorrow's meeting could be a gamechanger with profound geopolitical consequences.
It's no coincidence too that the meeting comes at precisely the moment when Moscow has upped the ante on eastern Ukraine's battlefields.
There in the Donbas these past days, Russian forces have breached the frontline along a narrow corridor parallel to Dobropillia, a coal-mining town turned key logistical hub north of the stronghold of Pokrovsk that Moscow's troops have almost encircled.
In short, grab as much territory as possible before any 'swapping of land', as Trump puts it, becomes part of the deal between him and Putin.
That European countries are outraged that Zelenskyy will not be present in Alaska as any deal is cut is justified. In a worst possible scenario, Ukraine and its European allies could be left with a very stark choice.
Either sign up to the deal and accept a rewriting of European security over their heads or reject it and risk Trump walking away from US military support for Ukraine.
Speaking to the US-based Foreign Policy magazine, John Foreman, a former UK defence attache to Moscow and Kyiv, summed up the worst fears of many about the outcome.
'I worry that his (Trump's) shared authoritarian instincts with Putin, lack of clarity in his mind about his own position and wish to be seen as a big man deciding the fate of nations at the stroke of a Sharpie will lead to him agreeing to terms which are wholly unacceptable,' Foreman warned.
For Putin, meanwhile, tomorrow's summit will mark his first visit to the US since 2015 and his first visit to the country since 2007 that has come outside of the context of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Should things go the way of the Russian leader, Trump would be giving away Ukrainian land that Putin could not win by force of arms.
Few doubt that the Kremlin's man would relish the humiliation of European leaders who have insisted that nothing about Ukraine should be decided without Ukraine.
Speaking earlier this week about the summit, Trump said it would be 'a feel-out meeting a little bit', adding that he would know within two minutes whether progress is possible.
'I may say 'lots of luck, keep fighting', or I may say 'we can make a deal',' Trump added.
Only tomorrow will tell which of those outcomes win the day. To say that nerves will remain frayed until then would be an understatement. In fact, they could well be in tatters in its aftermath.