"Peace in our time!"  Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin, 1938

George Rebane

Well hell, President Trump did not pull that one off in Anchorage.  With all the talking heads on Fox doing their best to put a good face on it, there’s no denying that Trump got nothing out of this abbreviated summit that he previewed the world as his goal.  Putin got everything – a global stage on which to show his equivalence to Trump, and a chance to rope-a-dope the west from the embarrassing post-summit podium that turned out to be an aborted joint press conference.  Trump just stood there and took it, when he should have been on AF1 headed back to Andrews.  Neither leader wanted to answer any spontaneous questions from a press corps that knew there would be no cease fire in Ukraine.  Both quickly got on their planes and outta there.

To add insult to injury, everyone now expects that there will be an embarrassing follow-on meeting after Putin has ample time to continue bombing the crap out of the Ukrainians and reoutfitting his forces for the next push to grab the four-city defensive line west of Donbas.

What I hope that we’ll hear out of our Fearless Leader, after he gathers his wits, is that the secondary sanctions on Russia will immediately go into effect, and that the EU/NATO leaders will immediately start shipping Zelinsky the promised weapons they will by from America.  Oh yes, and encourage the Ukrainians to start deep strikes into Russia, primarily Moscow and St Petersburg.  If Trump does nothing but talk about a second meeting during which this time he really, really will get Putin to behave, then this summit may well go down as Trump’s own Afghanistan debacle.

I will be the happiest if I have to eat these words.

[16aug25 update]  Seems that my sentiments about Anchorage are being widely shared today by usually Trump-favoring outlets like the WSJ.  The lamestream’s responses were preprogrammed regardless of the summit’s outcome.  The 16aug25 WSJ news coverage (here) concludes with, “In contrast to the handshakes and smiles that characterized the start of their meeting on the taxiway at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Putin and Trump looked stone-faced during much of the news conference. Putin spoke for roughly eight minutes. Trump then spoke for three minutes, before they both left.” 

The outcome was more harshly covered in the op-ed pages (here).  “… the Russian achieved one of his major goals from the summit, which is the start of his rehabilitation as a world leader. The summit ended his isolation from the West, and he gave up nothing for it. He also appears to have gained more time to continue bombing Ukrainian cities and slowly taking more territory.”