Voice of Ukraine

From: Atlantic Council By Frederick Kempe

The most important square foot in geopolitics is the space between Donald Trump’s ears.

That’s the way a Trump administration insider put it to me a few days ago, betraying pride by association, just as the White House announced the US president’s decision to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

A second Trump administration official told me he believes that what gives Trump such outsized geopolitical influence, some seven months into his administration, starts with his “heterodox” approach to foreign policy. That’s a fancy way of describing his out-of-the-box thinking on issues that have long defied conventional diplomacy. Trump is so confident in his own negotiating skills and in his country’s negotiating leverage that “he doesn’t mind who is on the other side of the table,” whether US friend or foe, the official explained.

When Trump and Putin gather for their summit in Alaska on Friday, it will mark the most significant test yet of Trump’s vaunted heterodoxy. He will sit opposite a Russian leader who has murdered domestic opponents and sent a quarter of a million Russians to their deaths fighting a largely stalemated war in Ukraine for three-and-a-half years. Views on whether Trump should be meeting with Putin at all are roughly divided along the lines of how much faith one has in this “most important square foot in geopolitics.” 

Critics such as the Financial Times’ Edward Luce summon the “ghosts of Munich, Yalta and other sordid bargains” ahead of the summit. Luce worries that Trump, who he believes lacks Putin’s grasp of history, could fulfill Ukraine’s worst fears and “give away land in the negotiating chamber that Russia could not win by force of arms.” In the meantime, Putin has escalated his summer assault on Ukraine’s Donetsk region to take as much land as possible before the meeting in Alaska.

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