On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin crossed the International Date Line between Magadan in Russia and Alaska in the US. The journey was literally and metaphorically a transit from yesterday’s isolation to a seat at the global high table. Putin, who has survived five US presidents, registered a victory before he reached Alaska, and again as he teased the plausibility inviting Trump to Moscow. Time sort of stood still for US President Donald J Trump. While he called the détente an “extremely productive meeting”, evidently the tide didn’t quite move his agenda or his fortunes for the coveted Nobel Prize.
The sweet treat Baked Alaska—conjured up in a New York restaurant to commemorate the acquisition of Alaska by the US—is an apt analogy for the summit. The dessert consisting of a sponge cake base encased in meringue is torched briefly, but only just to allow the meringue to be caramelised before the ice cream melts. The Alaska summit served a half-baked Alaska as the aspiration for a ceasefire was left in the oven for another day. As for Ukraine, it is possible that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said he “counted on America”, would be disappointed that no good came of it and relieved that Ukraine survived the worst fears.
The summit steeped in historical context—on a territory the US acquired from Russia—upended sanctified conventions. There was no dearth of optics. The applause as Putin arrived on the red carpet to a fly-past by fighter aircraft and a B2 bomber was striking. It was also wrapped in geopolitical messaging—from the choice of the venue, the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson known by its Cold War era motto ‘Top Cover for North America’, to sartorial signalling about past glory by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who arrived wearing a jumper emblazoned with the letters CCCP, the Russian acronym for USSR.
It is instructive that disappointment at the fizzle-out was not accompanied by surprise. Trump and Putin are given to hyperbole and carry the carcass of failed forecasts and claims. In September 2014, Putin claimed that Russian forces could conquer Kyiv in two weeks. Then, in February 2022, Putin declared that Russia would get to Kyiv within days. Similarly, Trump claimed in the run-up to the US presidential polls he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Three years and nearly a million deaths later, Russia is far from claiming victory and Trump’s claim has been flailing for over 207 days.
Trump draws his inspiration for geopolitics from his experience as a deal-making real estate baron. It is not surprising that he spoke about swapping land—much like realtors in Delhi exchanging corner plots for parcels of land. Business is omnipresent in Trump’s playbook. The US entourage included Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Titled ‘Pursuing Peace’, the summit seemed less about the war and more a bilateral investment and trade meet between two friendly, not adversarial, nations.
It is manifest that the US toolbox included a minerals-for-peace idea as a sweetener for Putin. In the run-up to the summit, Bessant held forth that it would explore commercial ties between the US and Russia, and declared that all options were on the table. The options included opening up Alaska’s natural resources to Russia (which arguably has the capability to explore such a terrain), lifting of sanctions on Russian aviation, and even access to the rare earth deposits in territories currently occupied by Russia.
It may be recalled that in May, Trump and Zelenskyy signed a minerals-for-peace deal. Ukraine has 22 of the 50 minerals defined by the US Geological Survey as critical for the production of chips, electric vehicles and defence equipment. The deal was billed by Trump as a payback for the $300-billion US support to Ukraine. The reality, as a recent study by Science Direct shows, is that nearly half of Ukraine’s metal resources are now under Russian occupation. Clearly, even though the issue of ceasefire was unresolved, the two sides which met for nearly three hours did discuss possibilities that could unravel in the future.
It is both a testimony to the complexity of the situation and the track record that not many were willing to bet on a positive headline on Friday. The past is frequently the prologue to the future. Trump is, by all accounts, a risk-taking entrepreneur not given to blush about the chasm between what he claimed and what did not happen. In June 2018, he broke all conventions to meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Singapore. Kim and Trump signed a document in which they agreed “to work toward complete denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula”. That was not to be, and in 2025, North Korea is supplying manpower to fight the war in Ukraine and man Russian factories.
Trump rated the Putin meeting a “10”. But as he says, “There is no deal until there is a deal.” What next? It is a question that will haunt the Trump administration and headlines. What about severe sanctions? Bessant did call out the Europeans on their stance on sanctions on China, but will Trump risk turmoil in the oil markets? What about the menace of tariffs on India and others? Presumably, they are on pause. The fog of peace is as thick as that of war. As Ronald Reagan, who propelled the end of the Cold War, famously said, “Status quo is Latin for the mess we are in.”
Read all columns by Shankkar Aiyar
SHANKKAR AIYAR
Author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12 Digit
Revolution, and Accidental India
(shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com)