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Coming out of a US-Russia summit nearly a quarter-century ago, President George W. Bush offered what would prove to be a terrible misread of Vladimir Putin:
I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy—I was able to get a sense of his soul.
In 2025, Americans don’t need to take a deep look into anyone’s soul to understand what Putin and Russia are all about. The cyrillic characters CCCP [ [link removed] ]—USSR [ [link removed] ], emblazoned upon Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov’s sweater as he strolled into an Anchorage hotel, speak for themselves.
It’s easy to look at yesterday’s Alaska fiasco and make it about Donald Trump. There are certainly many Trump-specific aspects of the summit that rendered it especially bad: The decision to host a revanchist Russian leader in a former Russian colony. The corrupt intermingling of Russian financiers with Trump’s business associates-turned-presidential advisors like Steve Witkoff. The president’s effusive praise for Vladimir Putin (Trump loves to flatter foreign leaders, unless that leader is the democratically-elected president of Ukraine). The blathering about Trump’s domestic political grudges. The words “PURSUING PEACE” plastered in all caps across official signage while Russian forces continue to murder Ukrainians in their homes and in schools [ [link removed] ], branding so boldly dishonest that only someone like Trump could keep a straight face in front of it.
But it would be a mistake to look at Alaska and only see a Trump problem.
Trump is America’s id. He is dangerous and brutish. Yet he is not an aberration. Trump is simply the most extreme expression of his predecessors’ failings. Every president from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden indulged Putin with the pomp and ceremony of official meetings, even if none of those presidents would have selected Alaska—the centerpiece of what was once Russkaya Amerika—as the venue.
No US president should have met with Putin at all after Russian troops attacked Georgia in 2008, and certainly not after Russia invaded Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014. The pageantry of an official meeting, even a handshake, with an American commander-in-chief is priceless for bad actors. It lets autocrats tell domestic and international audiences: “I’m legit.” Trump may have wanted a deal in Anchorage; Putin did not need one. Countless photographs alongside a beaming US president and the promise of another round of useless talks (“next time in Moscow,” if Putin’s invitation is accepted) were plenty for an old KGB hand looking to rehabilitate his international standing.
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The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans have desperately wanted to see post-Cold War Russia as a normal country with whom they could collaborate. Russia, even during the Yeltsin years, repeatedly dashed those hopes. While the United States and Europe celebrated the independence of the former Soviet republics, Moscow always saw those nations as less than fully sovereign, and these two worldviews were bound to clash.
Russia never stopped being an empire. American leaders were terribly late in realizing this.
President Obama forged ahead with a “reset” on the US relationship with the Kremlin even as Russian troops occupied Georgia and Moldova. He had harsh words for Putin after the seizure of Crimea and Donbas, but the forty-fourth president never supplied Kyiv with lethal aid.
Joe Biden also had nice things to say about Ukraine when he could manage to string the right words together. Unlike Obama, he delivered weapons, but only in fits and starts, never enough, and rarely on time.
Now, the world has Donald Trump. He says the wrong thing and he does the wrong thing. In the rare instances where Trump has helped Kyiv it was more happy accident than coherent strategy. Trump owns Friday’s shameful capitulation to Putin, but two-and-a-half decades of bad policy made it possible.
What’s needed now is a real alternative; for the United States to meaningfully support Ukraine against Russia. Yes, that means saying the right thing: to paraphrase the Hudson Institute’s Luke Coffey, the US should reaffirm that every inch of occupied territory, including Crimea, is as Ukrainian as Alaska is American [ [link removed] ]. But more importantly, it means matching that rhetoric with action. It means members of Congress from both parties checking the president on his betrayal of Ukraine and doubling down on support for other European allies. It means that those European governments step up and do more for the Ukrainians and for themselves. And it means recognizing that Russia is both a hostile power and a weaker country than America—and acting accordingly.
P.S. Whether you agree or disagree, let’s continue the discussion—in the comments, and on a Zoom call. Yes, Zoom! I’ve recently announced new Zoom calls [ [link removed] ] for paid subscribers so that we can have a real conversation. Check it out and please consider joining.
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