Stephens: How Trump can avoid a half-baked Alaska summit

By Bret Stephens / The New York Times

Donald Trump, the world’s greatest negotiator according to himself, may not think he needs much advice before his summit meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin on Friday. But the president should give Robert Kraft a call.

Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, knows what it’s like to be fleeced by the Russian president. On a visit to Russia in 2005 with U.S. business leaders, Kraft, at the urging of Citigroup’s then-chair, Sandy Weill, showed Putin one of his $25,000 Super Bowl rings.

“And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,’” Kraft recounted in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.” Kraft said he was urged by the Bush administration to pretend the ring had been a gift, while Putin later mocked Kraft’s complaint and suggested that the ring was embarrassingly cheap.

Petty crooks sometimes become big-time ones, and Putin’s career is a case in point; from reports of pilfering high-tech secrets from the West as a KGB agent in East Germany to suspicions about corrupt contracts while a mayoral deputy in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, orchestrating electoral theft in Russia and electoral meddling abroad, plundering the Russian economy and seizing territory from Georgia and now Ukraine.

This is not grand strategy at work. It’s grand larceny. It’s the essence of what Putin is about; and surely helps explain Trump’s long-held admiration for him.

Still, Trump probably will not want to reprise his performance at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where he swallowed Putin’s assurances that there had been no Russian meddling in the 2016 election and embarrassed the still embarrassable Republican Party. He may also be conscious that some of his predecessors made fools of themselves in past Russia summits, including George W. Bush (“I looked the man in the eye. I found him very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to get a sense of his soul”) and Barack Obama (“After my election I have more flexibility,” he said to Putin’s front-office man Dmitry Medvedev).

Much as Trump may envy Putin’s gangsterism, he won’t want to emerge from the meeting as Putin’s poodle. There are many ways this summit could go wrong, including vague talk of “land swapping” between Russia and Ukraine. But there’s also a way Trump can do something useful.

The most positive thing that can be said about this summit is that it can be cast as a final good-faith effort by the administration to give Russia a face-saving way to cut its losses: an estimated million casualties, the loss of much of its stock of tanks and bombers, NATO’s expansion, the slow strangulation of the Russian economy, a war without end. Trump can offer to lift sanctions on Russia and pledge that Ukraine will not join NATO. But the price on Putin should be high: full Russian withdrawal to the lines of February 2022, continued Western military assistance to Kyiv and nothing to preclude eventual Ukrainian membership in the European Union.

Putin will almost surely dismiss this as a nonstarter, even if it salvages his economy and ratifies his illegal, if probably irreversible, 2014 seizure of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine. But Trump can help himself by being explicit with Putin regarding the consequences of Russian rejectionism. A few items to lay on the table:

• Working with Europe to seize the estimated $300 billion of frozen Russian government assets to serve as a funding pool for Ukrainian purchases of Western arms. The president has the legal authority to do this under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, and George H.W. Bush already set a precedent by freezing and transferring Iraq’s frozen assets to a compensation fund following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

• Signing the bipartisan Senate sanctions bill on Russia, which includes a 500% tariff “on all goods and services imported into the United States from countries that knowingly engage in the exchange of Russian-origin uranium and petroleum products.”

• Removing all technical or targeting restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-supplied weapons.

• Pursuing a defense and technology cooperation pact with Kyiv on the model of U.S. military ties to Israel. Today especially, America has a lot to learn from Ukraine about the rapid development and fielding of drones on the battlefield.

• Supplying Kyiv with additional squadrons of F-16s and other weaponry that can defend Ukraine’s skies and hold Russian military targets at risk.

The choice between these two sets of options — the offramp versus the road to hell — should be Putin’s to make. Though public opinion counts for almost nothing in Putin’s Russia, Russians should still know that their president was offered an honorable peace and refused it.

The choice will also have to involve Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, who run the risk of being treated in this summit much as the government of Czechoslovakia was treated by the powers who met in Munich, Germany, in 1938. Neville Chamberlain is yet another leader to whom Trump won’t want to see himself compared. Friday is Trump’s chance to show he’s better.

While he’s at it, he can also ask Putin to return Kraft’s ring.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.