Donald Trump's Alaska meeting with Vladimir Putin highlights America's erratic diplomacy

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

There's been a certain surreal quality to the reporting and analysis leading up to the summit in Alaska between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, a surreal quality that equally infects global issues from Gaza to the US president's global tariff plays.
On the one hand, there is the (often incredulous) reporting of the US president's regularly changing positions which, so often, seem driven by nothing more than personal ego and his attempts to shape events into a perceived win or portray them as further evidence that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
On the other, there is the cold reality that what is at stake in Alaska, just as it is in Gaza and in world markets, is actually deadly serious: whether it has a bearing on the power balance in Europe, starving people who are at risk of mass displacement, or massive disruptions in world trade flows.
Other world leaders are rightly anxious about just what Trump might agree to, about the future of another sovereign country, when left in a room with Putin in Alaska.
Yet it is a country — and a war — over which he has little control and from which, in fact, he has been purposefully walking away from controlling since he returned to office at the beginning of this year.
The United States's pre-eminent position in world affairs for much of the past century has rested on money, its military might, and as the designated 'leader of the free world': the power that leads the strategy of all the other powerful Western democracies.
The US president continues to make bold declarations about what he will or won't make happen on the basis that those levers remains utterly pre-eminent; that he maintains that financial, military and moral authority even as we watch every day as the rise of other powers, or his own actions, make all that authority look like more of a delusion than a reality.
We are watching the theatre of regular summits and crisis meetings of world leaders that became a standard part of international politics, particularly in the last half century, but it really feels like that now it is people going through the motions without any real sense of anything being seriously expected or achieved.
The days of G7, G8 or G20 meetings when Western nations would or could set out agreements for how the world would work are gone. In Trump's first term, people spoke of the G20 turning into the G19 plus one.
Someone in recent weeks described the current Trumpian world of international politics as more G minus one.
And that is the bit that is both a bit weird, and potentially the salvation from the fluffier-headed bits of Donald Trump's erratic interventions around the globe.
Consider Ukraine. It's only a few months ago that Trump cut off military aid — and even other sorts — to Ukraine, then did a deal under which it would be Europeans who would support their besieged neighbour by paying for most of the US military equipment that it so desperately needed.
There's something to be said for forcing European nations to increase their defence budgets rather than being virtual free-riders on the defence budget of the United States.
But the shift does have a strategic impact: European countries start to think more for themselves and also feel less bound to follow the US in any particular direction.
In the past month, we have seen the always strategically ambitious French president Emmanuel Macron trying to lead the discussions, and actions, on Ukraine and Gaza.
And now the German chancellor Friedrich Merz has also emerged as a willing player — perhaps the first German leader since Angela Merkel to step up like this.
Merz didn't follow other countries down the road of recognising Palestine but instead took the significant material step of announcing a ban on the sale of some military weapons to Israel that might be used in its offensives in Gaza. This week he has led the European push to make sure Trump understood that Europe has Ukraine's back.
Various scenarios have been floated about what might happen in Alaska.
The Financial Times reports that in the discussion between Trump, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders earlier this week there was talk of a non-NATO peacekeeping force being deployed after any ceasefire to which the US might offer security guarantees (all steps to get around Putin's hostility to both Ukraine joining NATO or NATO having any forces on the ground in Ukraine).
While some might see that as delivering Putin's aim of breaking up NATO, it sounds like the determination of Europe to go it alone, if necessary, in supporting Ukraine might make that only partially academic.
All these considerations beg the question of how much capacity, really, Trump has to be claiming to be speaking on behalf of Ukraine, or even trading the country away without speaking on its behalf.
There will be plenty of analysis of the personal relationship between Trump and Putin: indeed there already has been, with most of it suggesting at the very least that Putin has already "won" the summit by the fact it has been called at all (and on US territory).
At worst, the critics say, Putin has already completely "played" the US president's vanity and may yet play him further by raising a whole series of extra distracting issues (about which Putin is not actually serious) like nuclear arms. It would be playing Trump at his own distracting game.
The erratic nature of current American diplomacy is highlighted by the fact that Trump has been prepared to junk his relationship with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi — and any goodwill in the US-India relationship — over Russia in recent weeks.
India has taken an exceptionally dim view of Trump's decision to impose punitive tariffs because India buys a lot of Russian oil and gas.
Yet this week, there was talk of new US-Russian business deals and collaborations.
The business trading that has become such a huge aspect of Trump's international adventures suggests one good reason why not even the US president can easily agree to the idea of Russia being allowed to hold on to those parts of Eastern Ukraine that it already occupies.
For it is in the east that a lot of the rare earths that Trump has been seeking are located. Agreeing to hand those areas over to Putin would come at a cost to Trump's strategy (let alone what it would mean for people who live there or for European security).
Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, has accelerated his incursions into Ukraine with the apparent aim of holding as much ground as possible as a fait accompli if some deal is struck.
Israel is adopting the same strategy: announcing a widely condemned move to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank which would split the Palestinian enclave in two.
Far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said the plan was "a reality that buries the idea of a Palestinian state, because there's nothing to recognise and no one to recognise it".
For now, Trump's failure to effectively intervene in the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, or at least his stop-start pronouncements about what is happening in Israel, have been swamped by the other events in the world.
But if he has a strategy, or even a preferred outcome, it is no longer clear.
Failing to intervene with Israel in Gaza certainly seems to undermine his earlier ambitions to improve relationships between Israel and other countries in the region like Saudi Arabia.
Equally, one of the most perplexing aspects of his global tariffs strategy, and the way he has mixed it up with geo-strategic interests, is his approach to China.
China is, after all, the biggest target in Trump's attempts to reconfigure world trade and the world economy.
Yet to date his position on tariffs has been to roll over and delay negotiations. There was a further extension to another of the US president's ever-changing deadlines this week when he said the plan to impose tariffs of 145 per cent on China had been put back for a second time by 90 days.
That hasn't stopped him imposing heavy "trans-shipment" tariffs on country's that trade heavily with China, or are deeply embedded in China's supply chains.
And it hasn't stopped one of the more bizarre and self-harming deals he has done on the international stage: agreeing to allow Nvidia to lift the ban on it selling its H20 microchips to China, in exchange for the government getting a 15 per cent cut of the profits.
Microchips are regarded as a huge competitive and strategic issue, and as a result, one of the more powerful bargaining levers Trump could pull whenever the two economic superpowers eventually sit down to resolve their trade differences. Except he has already done a deal on them.
China is now playing a very different trade strategy to the one in which Australia got ensnared a few years ago.
While it once played hardball by cutting off access to its own markets for other countries, observers have been noting it is now instead playing the trade game by limiting access to things it produces.
Around the world, countries are making their own decisions about their best interests. Increasingly, these are not made with the United States in mind, or in spite of, the United States.
Laura Tingle is the ABC's Global Affairs Editor.