A. Wess Mitchell
Diplomacy with Russia is not capitulation, and talking to Vladimir Putin is not a reward for good behavior.
The recent hardening of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s position on Ukraine has led some critics to claim that the Trump meeting in Anchorage was a waste of time. A few have gone further and alleged that Trump effectively capitulated to Putin in the meeting, drawing the obligatory comparisons to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement of Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938.
This is bad history and poor analysis. In fact, Trump’s diplomacy with Putin was a potentially game-altering move that could pay significant strategic dividends down the road. By focusing on immediate outcomes for Ukraine, critics are missing both the underlying logic of Trump’s moves and their potential benefits for US national interests and international stability.
First, talking to Russia helps alleviate the number one danger facing America, which is the possibility of a war on multiple fronts beyond our immediate ability to win. The reason we are in this predicament is that the United States and Europe didn’t use the last four years to surge defense production while the Russians (and Chinese) did.
The Pentagon estimates that it will take between three and eighteen years to replenish the key munitions that have been sent to Ukraine. The quickest way to strengthen deterrence in East Asia is to engineer a denouement in Eastern Europe. Even if that doesn’t transpire quickly, the fact that the United States is spearheading a peace process and dragooning parties to the table means the Chinese have to assume we will have greater bandwidth in Asia than we did previously.
Second, Anchorage has to be viewed in the context of Trump’s overall strategy, which is constraining Putin’s geopolitical field of maneuver. Before the two men even sat down at Anchorage, Trump’s team had used strategic diplomacy to persuade the Arabs to keep global oil supplies up (thereby depressing Russian state revenues), persuade the Europeans to launch the biggest defense spending hike in modern history (from a goal of 2 percent to a goal of 5 percent), and persuade Armenia and Azerbaijan to make peace (eroding Russia’s influence in its own backyard).
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