Jim McDowell: Let's pray Trump's Alaska summit doesn't become a cold war carve up
Remember that quote when all the dust has settled — and, hopefully, not the nuclear ash — around the Trump/Putin head-to-head on Friday.
However, those words were not uttered by a US delegate to the Alaska summit.
In an uncanny twist, they were voiced 80 years ago at another US/Russia rumpus over land... with Britain as the tripartite participant.
That took place in Crimea.
Remember Crimea?
That was the first part of Ukraine Putin annexed before trying to invade the rest of President Volodymyr Zelensky's brave but battered and embattled country.
But it was in Crimea, in the Black Sea port of Yalta eight decades ago at the end of the Second World War, that a summit not dissimilar to that in Alaska took place.
And what was at stake was not just the survival of one small sovereign state which for over three years has stood toe-to-toe with the might of the Red Army.
But the future of Europe.
And a Cold War carve-up which was to last for the next 34 years, until the fall of the USSR in 1991, the historical symbol of which was the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At that Yalta conference were US President Franklin D Roosevelt, Russian Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill — dubbed 'The Big Three' in the press at the time.
And in another uncanny twist, another leader who thought he should be there, the Free French forces leader and then provisional President of France, Charles de Gaulle, took it as a slight that he was not invited.
Just like President Zelensky on Friday. And there are more similarities.
President Donald Trump greets Russia's President Vladimir Putin (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)
Trump, who with his vice-president puppet JD Vance bullied and berated Zelensky at the White House, didn't want him there: because he had already ill-disguised his dislike of the Ukrainian leader.
De Gaulle believed Roosevelt harboured a long-standing personal antagonism towards him.
And Stalin and the Russians also point-blank objected to de Gaulle being a full participant.
Just as Putin did to Zelensky this time around.
So a direct European input was denied in Yalta back then.
Even though it was Europe, and Germany in particular, which was to be split East and West.
Now the European Union and the UK, with PM Keir Starmer and his counterparts limited to phone diplomacy, are left sidelined again.
Trump may have promised that he would take their opinions and concerns into consideration. But when was Trump ever concerned about anything, or anybody, other than himself?
Ditto Putin.
History dictates that Stalin tried to strong-arm the Yanks and Brits into getting what he wanted at Yalta.
And he did.
It remains to be seen, in retrospect, whether Putin, whose hero is said to be Stalin, managed to do the same in Anchorage: or will succeed at subsequent summits, if they transpire.
Meantime, that quote at the top remains as relevant today as it did 80 years ago.
The observation was made by James F Byrne, a senior US delegate at Yalta who was later to become the White House Secretary of State.
Only this time, it is 'not a question of what Trump would let the Russians do, but what the US can get Putin to do'.
It is too soon to make a call on that so soon after Friday.
But perhaps it is not too soon to hope that both parties adhere to an old Russian proverb.
It is: 'You have two ears, one mouth — listen twice as much as you speak'.
As the dust settles on this summit, we can only hope that both so-called world leaders did just that: not just for the future of Ukraine, but for the future of the world.
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