Alaska, said mountaineer Jon Krakauer, reminds you of how small you are.
For that reason alone, the vast and mostly empty state is an ideal setting for this weekend’s summit between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
The presidents of Russia and the US can both use the kind of humility that Alaska can inspire in mortals. However, the Russian guest, who arrives at this meeting as the biggest imperial loser since Saddam Hussein, needs Alaska’s humbling much more urgently than his American host.
Trump may be an aspiring autocrat, but in fact, he is an autocrat’s caricature. Putin is the real thing, as Trump will soon understand: a man of war for whom peace, whether at home or abroad, is a threat, an abomination, and an unthinkable choice.
HAVING BECOME Russia’s leader unexpectedly, following Boris Yeltsin’s abrupt resignation in the last hours of 1999, no one knew what to expect of the enigmatic man he picked as his successor.
An early hint emerged in summer 2000, after the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk disappeared north of Norway. The disaster that ended with the vessel’s 118 sailors dead triggered harsh attacks in Russian media about Putin’s handling of the crisis. Putin’s conclusion was not to listen to the media, but to conquer it.
That was the beginning of Russia’s shift to czarist-style autocracy, a political regression even when compared with the Communist era’s last decades. Putin would not be Leonid Brezhnev, who had a government he actually consulted. Putin would be Tsar Nikolai.
The assault on the opposition and the press, which would include assassinations, came coupled with a longing for the communist era’s imperium, a quest that produced military attacks on Georgia, on southern Ukraine, and then on all of Ukraine.
Further afield, meanwhile, Putin made what seemed like an ingenious gambit, building almost overnight an airbase in Syria; landing in it dozens of warplanes, and deploying them in the Syrian civil war, where he took sides, decided the winner, and collected a priceless strategic vassal.
That was in 2015. Between that and the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin seemed to have restored Russia’s imperial prestige and sway. Putin was now celebrated as a master of statecraft who, unlike his Western counterparts, knew what he wanted and got it done.
Now, very little of this aura will be arriving with Putin in Alaska, though he is still convinced that the war he concocted was Russia’s destiny. It wasn’t Russia’s destiny, it was its choice, or rather its leader’s choice, and this choice’s results, from his own viewpoint, have been catastrophic.
PUTIN’S UKRAINIAN failure surfaced quickly, when the Russian military displayed inferior hardware, poor maintenance, poorly trained troops, and unimaginative commanders. This was besides the industrial malfunctions attributed to theft, embezzlement, and compromised standards in factories that produced Russian armor, munitions, and guns.
This is also besides Russia having been counter-invaded while facing massive drone attacks, losing more than 250,000 troops, and failing to make its citizens identify with the war, so much so that Putin had to rent North Korean troops.
Later battlefield events made some claim that the tide is turning against Ukraine. That may have been true tactically, and may also result in some territorial concessions that Putin can be counted on to paint as victory. In fact, by any strategic yardstick, Russia’s grand attack resulted in grand defeat.
Russia is defeated because its leaders’ original hopes to conquer Kyiv, remove its elected government, and effectively reduce Ukraine to a Russian client state – have been dashed.
Not only did Ukraine retain its independence, but its alliance with the West became open, intense, and ironclad. Moreover, Putin’s quest to block NATO’s expansion boomeranged, as the war actually made NATO expand, to Finland and Sweden, two militarily strong countries whose previous neutrality was a pillar of Russian diplomacy.
And all that was before Putin’s Middle Eastern gambit ended in a colossal fiasco.
Russia’s imperial failure
The downfall of Syria’s Bashar Assad undid the strategic bastion Moscow had cultivated with great investment in treasure and personnel. With it vanished the naval base in Tartus that Russia treasured as its Mediterranean outpost.
Meanwhile, in Iran, Russian-made anti-aircraft batteries were overpowered by Western aircraft. Now, demand for Russian arms is set to plunge. Putin’s success last decade in selling arms to Egypt and Saudi Arabia will not be repeated in the near future. Russian arms, like Moscow’s imperial strategy, are now associated with failure.
THE MOST telling reflection of Russia’s imperial failure was this week’s meeting in the White House between the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
These enemy lands are not just on Russia’s doorstep; they are former Soviet republics. If anyone is supposed to broker peace between them, it is Russia. That failure is itself monumental, but the fact that their peace broker is Uncle Sam is altogether proverbial.
In fact, it’s a microcosm of the Russian tragedy.
Russia meddled in many wars, but never brokered peace. America did, repeatedly, from the Russo-Japanese treaty in 1905 to Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt in 1979, the PLO in 1993, and Jordan in 1994.
Putin was in a position to follow that example, but to be a peacemaker, he would have to do what autocrats never do: negotiate. Autocrats don’t negotiate. They impose. They impose their beliefs, their plots, and their pawns on the public, the media, and the courts.
That’s what they do at home, and that’s what they do abroad. That’s why when spoken to in the language of negotiation, they understand nothing, and comply even less. That’s what happened with Yasser Arafat at Camp David, that’s what happened with Hitler in Munich, and that’s what will happen with Putin in Alaska, despite its vast snowfields and pristine mountains’ silent statement that they are this big, and he is that small.
www.MiddleIsrael.net
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, Yediot Sefarim 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.