The surprise news last week of a Trump-Putin summit raised the stakes in the ongoing US efforts to establish a ceasefire in Ukraine. Having played the ultimate card of a presidential summit, the only result that counts will be the full and complete ceasefire that President Trump has long demanded and that Ukraine accepted five months ago.
Short of that, the summit will be a failure with peace further out of reach for the foreseeable future.
So, what might deliver a ceasefire? Not a performative meeting that allows Vladimir Putin to wriggle out of sanctions and buy time. Instead, Trump should study President Ronald Reagan at Reykjavik.
Here’s how:
Be the bigger bear
As I’ve written previously, the Russians seated across the table in a negotiation consider themselves bears at a dance. If you choose to dance with a bear, the saying goes, the bear determines when and how the dance ends. Unless you’re a bigger bear.
Putin will arrive in Alaska believing he can manipulate Trump. The US may be the far more powerful country, but Russia is the power in Ukraine and Putin is fully committed to his objective there: to subjugate the entire country. He believes his commitment to those aims is greater than Trump’s commitment to supporting Ukraine to blunt them.
So, Putin will likely aim to convince Trump that Russia’s goals are reasonable, and that Russia is committed to a peaceful resolution, even while the peaceful resolution Putin seeks is one that requires the complete subjugation of Ukraine. He may then seek to draw Trump into supporting a protracted diplomatic process — without stopping the war.
Trump should not fall for this. The one consistency in his policy from the start has been the call for an unconditional 30-day ceasefire during which negotiations can begin to end the war. Ukraine signed up in March, after which Secretary of State Rubio declared, “Russian reciprocity is the key to achieving peace.” Since then, Russia has only escalated the war, with its attacks against Ukraine having doubled since Trump entered office.
But Trump can now demand a ceasefire from Putin from a position of strength.
Last month, he announced a new Ukraine policy whereby the failure of Russia to accept a ceasefire triggers increasing and crippling economic sanctions on both Russia and any purchaser of Russian energy products. He has thus far followed through with tariffs on India, the second largest purchaser of those products behind China. He also confirmed continuation of US military support to Ukraine through systems paid for and delivered by NATO allies. And he led a successful NATO summit where allies agreed to increase their defense spending at 5 percent of GDP, higher than what the US spends on defense.
This new demonstration of support for Ukraine means that Russia’s continuing the war will lead to its continuing losses and economic strain. Putin might strut confidently into a summit, but behind him lie one million Russian military casualties from his disastrous invasion of Ukraine, including 250,000 dead. All the American side needs to convey is that short of a ceasefire and then a negotiation process (in that order, not the reverse) the situation will not improve for Putin, and his aims in Ukraine will remain out of reach.
Trump also arrives in a strong position globally. One thing that Putin knows, understands, and respects is power. He will have noticed the American airstrikes on Iran, a projection of military power from bases inside the United States, as both an impressive feat that the Russian military could never hope to match, as well as a demonstration of Trump’s tolerance for risk and readiness to exert muscle when required.
Just last week, when Russia’s former President Demitry Medvedev warned Trump that his ultimatum to Russia on Ukraine was “a step towards war” with the US, Trump responded by announcing the deployment of two nuclear-powered submarines towards Russia.
In sum, the president of the United States is arriving at this summit in a far stronger position than the president of Russia, and the negotiation strategy should reflect that equation. This is an opportunity to demand and stick to principle, which is the only path to peace. Putin must agree to stop the war he started, or else we should leave Alaska empty-handed.
Reykjavik model: A failed summit leads to peace
With that backdrop, Trump should take inspiration from the portrait of Reagan hanging behind the Resolute Desk. In October 1986, Reagan met Russia’s President Mikhail Gorbachev in the capital of Iceland to discuss de-escalation between the Cold War powers, and for the first time, the possibility of a sweeping nuclear arms control pact. As the Russians often do, Gorbachev arrived well prepared with new proposals, fallback positions, and forward leaning prescriptions for cutting back Moscow’s nuclear arsenal.
Reagan wanted a deal too, and over two days of talks, the two sides agreed on parameters for what could have been a historic outcome. Reagan, however, also arrived with firm principles on which he would not budge. One of those was the nascent missile defense system known at the time as Star Wars, which Moscow knew it could never match and viewed as a threat to their military capabilities and the deterrent value of its missiles.
When Gorbachev demanded as part of a deal that the US abandon efforts to develop and deploy such a system, Reagan flatly rejected the proposal. The talks deadlocked, and the two leaders walked out of the summit looking grim and disappointed.
Reportedly, when Gorbachev asked Reagan just before that grim-faced photo what else could have been done to achieve peace, Reagan told him, “You should have said ‘Yes.’” The Reykjavik summit at the time was deemed a spectacular diplomatic failure.
But Reagan’s refusal to budge, even at risk of increasing Cold War tensions, and the failed summit one month before midterm elections ultimately set the conditions for peace. One year later, the US and USSR signed the first treaty to eliminate a category of nuclear weapons. In 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Washington still pursuing missile defense innovations, the US and Russia signed the sweeping Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I).
Historians today point to Reykjavik as a turning point in the Cold War, crediting Reagan’s principled stand with Gorbachev as a foundation for peace.
Lesson applied to Ukraine
In Alaska, Putin will seek to influence Trump with promises of cooperation on other global matters, from Iran, to China, to trade and access to markets and minerals, to civil-nuclear cooperation, and counterterrorism. While the summit is supposed to be about Ukraine, the Russians will aim to distract the US side with various unrelated agenda items, seeking to portray an image of two great powers cooperating on global affairs.
I’ve seen this tactic up close. When I led a channel with Russia on the Syria conflict, our agenda focused on risks of a military confrontation between our forces. But the Russians often arrived with a list of unrelated issues or presented mementos from World War II to suggest that Washington and Moscow cooperation is the key to a more stable world. It was our job on the American side to keep the discussion focused solely on issues that mattered to us and the outcome we aimed to achieve, which was the point of the meeting.
In Alaska on Friday, the American side should similarly keep the focus solely on Ukraine and make clear that cooperation on other issues is possible — with Ukraine resolved.
On Ukraine, the Russians will likely present detailed proposals with maps, or propose new prisoner exchanges, or perhaps localized and limited ceasefires. Putin will claim that he is prepared for a lasting peace, and praise Trump as the only leader who can achieve it. This may all sound promising and appeal to Trump’s performative interests, but it’s a trap for the American side.
What Putin aims to do is delay any imposition of new sanctions, continue to prosecute the war, and shift the burden for peace in Trump’s mind back on Zelensky.
If Trump aims for a summit that advances the cause of peace in Ukraine, he should channel Reagan and stick to his own declared principle: a full 30-day ceasefire. Short of that, there should be no further discussion, particularly of new territorial concessions reportedly to be demanded by Russia from Ukraine. Anything short of Russia stopping the war — with further negotiations to end it altogether taking place during a ceasefire — will be a failure, and to set the conditions needed for peace in Ukraine, the president should be prepared to walk.
In comments on Monday, Trump described the summit as a “feel-out meeting” as opposed to a meeting with the desired outcome. Reagan would not have taken that approach, and neither should Trump.
Not on the table, on the menu
One final and important reason to avoid being drawn into detailed discussions with maps and adjustments to the line-of-contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces is that the Ukrainians are not participating on this summit. There is a famous saying in diplomacy: “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” And Putin will want the world to see images of him seated with Trump on American soil with maps in hand to draw up future boundaries in a European country that he invaded. If there is lasting risk in this summit, it’s that image, one Putin covets and the United States under no circumstances should ever grant.
With a ceasefire in hand, then the table will be set for these detailed negotiations of which Ukraine would need to be a full participant. That sequence cannot be reversed.
Past is prologue
Last week on CNN, John King rightly pressed me on whether there was any serious chance that Trump might channel Reagan as opposed to Trump himself during his face-to-face encounter with Putin in Helsinki. There, in 2018, the president seemed to accept Putin’s version of global affairs and sided with Russia over his own intelligence community on charges of Russian efforts to influence American elections.
Will Alaska be the same? Let’s hope not.
As the Secretary General of NATO, Marke Rutte, pointed out on Sunday, “We have seen President Trump putting tremendous pressure on Russia” and the summit in Alaska “will be about testing Putin, how serious he is on bringing this terrible war to an end.” Seven months into Trump’s presidency, albeit with fits and starts, predictions that he would abandon Kyiv have proved unfounded, and Trump has even hardened his policy towards Moscow while boosting his support for the Ukrainians. There is risk that Alaska reverses this new policy direction and removes pressure from Putin to end the war.
But that outcome is not inevitable. By maintaining a firm line on a ceasefire, Trump’s own declared policy from the start of his presidency, this summit has potential to kickstart a process that ultimately leads to a just resolution of the war. The outcome is binary: Is there a ceasefire after Alaska, or not? Everything else is extraneous and a distraction.
And to succeed in Alaska, the president might look for inspiration from Reykjavik.