August 19, 2025

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

After Trump-led Alaska And White House Summits, Zelensky And Putin Agree To Meet On Path To Peace 

By Robert Romano 

A flurry of optimistic diplomatic activity has followed President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s historic, apparently successful summit in Anchorage, Alaska on Aug. 15 as a peace process has officially begun between the heads of state of Russia and Ukraine, with Volodymyr Zelensky agreeing to meet with Putin after Trump convened an Oval Office meeting between the heads of the U.S., UK, France, Italy, Finland, NATO and the European Commission. 

If successful, President Trump says the Zelensky-Putin meeting will be followed by a trilateral U.S.-Russia-Ukraine meeting to hammer out a peace agreement that guarantees the security of Ukraine, Europe and Russia — and ends the war in Ukraine that has raged since 2014 following the removal of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Russia’ annexation of Crimea and eastern Ukrainian provinces, with perhaps 1 million dead after a decade of fighting. 

The critical breakthrough leading to the impromptu White House summit occurred in Alaska at the Trump-Putin meeting. What was so important? Here are some of things Putin said following the agreement with Trump to end the war.  

Putin said the agreement with Trump could “pave the path towards peace”: “I would like to hope that the agreement that we've reached together will help us bring closer that goal and will pave the path towards peace in Ukraine.” 

Putin said that to end the war that it was necessary to “reinstate a just balance of security in Europe”  and agreed with President Trump that “the security of Ukraine should be ensured as well”. This was a critical concession guaranteeing Ukraine’s security — and therefore sovereignty — following the war’s conclusion. Kyiv stands. 

And the world turns back from the brink. Putin warned that “the situation should not be brought to the point of no return…” He’s not wrong.  

President Trump has said getting a peace agreement with Russia and Ukraine was the most difficult, but it is also the most dangerous conflict in the world, with Russian and NATO coming closer to conflict than ever since the end of the Cold War over the fate of Ukraine. At the White House, Western leaders were adamant: It has to stop. 

NATO admission for Ukraine appears to have been ruled out. Instead, now Trump has to hold Putin to his promise that “the security of Ukraine should be ensured as well” as both sides figure out how to balance strategic forces in Europe to both Washington and Moscow’s satisfaction.  

Trump alone has envisioned a de-escalation of the simmering conflict in Ukraine his entire political career that began in 2015 when he began running for president. By 2016, Trump was running on a peace platform, warning against escalations in Ukraine and Syria.  

It was all sidetracked by the unfortunate Russiagate fiasco — Trump said at the Alaska summit “We were interfered with by the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” — that brought U.S.-Russian relations to all-time lows in 2016 and then hindered President Trump’s ability to deal effectively in Ukraine leading the 2019 impeachment hoax.  

Even so, Trump kept the peace, tenuous as it was, before all hell broke loose after he left office. Putin said the war would have been avoided if Trump had been reelected in 2020: “when President Trump is saying that if he was the president back then, there would be no war, and I'm quite sure that it would indeed be so. I can confirm that.” 

Weakness is provocative, and former President Joe Biden — who oversaw Ukraine policy under the presidency of Barack Obama including the overthrow of Yanukovych — was unable to deter Russian aggression in neither 2014 nor 2022. The plunge towards war began before Trump ever took office.  

Once again, sometimes, it takes a new president who, with the strength and vision necessary, can take what might be and make it what will be. War is a choice — and so is peace — and Trump wills it. The meeting is happening. It wasn’t happening a week ago, but now it is.  

Trade is a huge inducement. The opposite is sanctions, and worse. “U.S. and Russian investment and business cooperation has tremendous potential” Putin said, and hinted at a trade agreement, which Trump acknowledged, stating, “We also have some tremendous Russian business representatives here. And I think, you know, everybody wants to deal with us… We look forward to dealing — we're going to try and get this over with.” 

The same could be said of Ukraine and Russia. Besides ending direct hostilities, being such close neighbors, one of the fastest ways to repair the damage from the war will be to resume normal economic activities, contracts, agricultural and rare earth mineral production, and working out a deal that secures and expands the shipping out of the Black Sea for all parties. Start building things instead of breaking them. 

The security guarantees naturally will have to permit peaceful commercial traffic. Get the trade negotiators in there to sweeten the deal with U.S. investments. Make it too good to reject. 

And then there are the broader security issues surrounding Europe that have been revisited by Presidents since Harry Truman, including Dwight Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” proposal of 1953 that culminated in the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Richard Nixon’s ABM and Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty with Russia, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev’s breakthroughs and strategic arms reductions beginning with the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 and later the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties in 1991 and 2010. Diplomacy ended the Cold War even while it was being fought. 

Trump can offer to resume U.S.-Russian summitry on nuclear questions following the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM and INF Treaties under George W. Bush and Trump in 2002 and 2019, respectively. Nuclear proliferation has continued — currently nine countries are known to have nuclear weapons — and it is no longer sufficient that nuclear arms agreements only involve the two superpowers, although the U.S. and Russia having the most must absolutely set the tempo for those discussions.  

And then there’s space diplomacy. Start doing more missions and stuff like that. Upgrade or replace the space station. There’s lots of opportunities there and advances in rocketry and space exploration that should create areas for cooperation where there is mutual interest in advancing the sciences including astronomy. 

The truth is, almost anything is better than war, and certainly better than one that threatens humanity itself. President Trump and President Putin, and now President Zelensky, are in agreement. It’s time to talk. It’s about time.  

Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government Foundation.  

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/08/after-trump-led-alaska-and-white-house-summits-zelensky-and-putin-agree-to-meet-on-path-to-peace/