Trump and Putin’s Alaska Summit Was Nothing More Than an Elaborate Photo Op

There isn’t much left to say about that spectacle in Alaska. It was no more humiliating to us than what we did to ourselves by electing a vulgar talking yam on the edge of complete senility—twice. All it succeeded in doing was making an easy day’s work for the crews back on Russian TV.

Vladimir Putin got what he wanted—a glorified photo op and the implicit endorsement of the United States of whatever he wants to do in Ukraine, including concocting some phony peace deal that will let him keep the land he’s stolen, and the children he’s stolen, and escape all responsibility for the civilians he’s killed, and which undoubtedly won’t be worth the бумага it’s printed on.

Trump gets another slice of rage-suffused artificial triumph he can allow to go rancid in the malfunctioning freezer unit of his mind. From his Truth Social account:

It’s incredible how the Fake News violently distorts the TRUTH when it comes to me. There is NOTHING I can say or do that would lead them to write or report honestly about me. I had a great meeting in Alaska on Biden’s stupid War, a war that should have never happened!!!

And then I wrote… If I got Russia to give up Moscow as part of the Deal, the Fake News, and their PARTNER, the Radical Left Democrats, would say I made a terrible mistake and a very bad deal. That’s why they are the FAKE NEWS! Also, they should talk about the 6 WARS, etc., I JUST STOPPED!!! MAGA

Now that the Napoleon bouffée portion of the proceedings has been chewed over by the news cycle on several continents, and now that, on Monday, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has shown up at the White House with every European leader back to William Gladstone in train behind him—smart move, by the way—and now that we’ve listened to the president bullshit about how safe he’s made Washington in the past four days and about the six wars he’s personally stopped while all the European leaders sat on the couch looking like spectators at a car bombing, I began to remember another summit between a cognitively impaired president and an ambitious Russian premier.

In October 1986, after months of delay, President Ronald Reagan, already alarming his staff with moments of vagueness and incoherence, met with Russian premier Mikhail Gorbachev, whose empire was already falling to pieces in order to discuss nuclear disarmament.

In January 1986, Gorbachev had sent Reagan a letter proposing a three-step program aimed at the complete abolition of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. This shook the hawkish elements in both countries. (Both Casper Weinberger and Richard Perle, to name only two stubborn boils on American diplomatic history, were vehemently against it.) In a private meeting late in the summit, Reagan and Gorbachev actually agreed on the total abolition of nuclear weapons. Some members of both negotiating teams were completely blindsided by this, and they were quite relieved when the agreement foundered because the two leaders could not come to an agreement on Reagan’s beloved Strategic Defense Initiative. From the National Security Archive:

The documents show that U.S. analysis of Gorbachev's goals for the summit completely missed the Soviet leader's emphasis on "liquidation" of nuclear weapons, a dream Gorbachev shared with Reagan and which the two leaders turned to repeatedly during the intense discussions at Reykjavik in October 1986. But the epitaph for the summit came from Soviet aide Gyorgy Arbatov, who at one point during staff discussions told U.S. official Paul Nitze that the U.S. proposals (continued testing of missile defenses in the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI while proceeding over 10 years to eliminate all ballistic missiles, leading to the ultimate abolition of all offensive nuclear weapons) would require "an exceptional level of trust" and therefore "we cannot accept your position."

Nowhere was the failure of this proposal celebrated more enthusiastically than on the American Right, where Reagan was denounced by some of his most fervent early supporters as a naif, an appeaser, or worse. There even were hints that Reagan’s mentis was becoming non compos.

Henry (Finally Dead) Kissinger bloviated until hell wouldn’t have it about how Gorbachev’s glasnost policies, which included his sincere belief in disarmament, were ploys to make the USSR stronger. (People thought this guy was brilliant once. No, really.) George Will called the day that Reagan and Gorbachev signed the IBF treaty, which banned all ground-launched and cruise missiles with a certain range, the day the U.S. lost the Cold War. Called that one a little early, pal. (The U.S. withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019 in one of the last acts of Trump’s first presidency.)

So that’s how even a half-dotty American president who takes his job remotely seriously can do some business. Now, we have a completely dotty old fool who makes U.S. servicemen kneel before a murderous dictator on American soil.