Commentary: Trump should reject Putin’s plan for a great powers summit

LONDON: The mere prospect of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump meeting for a great-powers summit while at the Asia Pacific Economic Community’s annual gathering next month is causing concern among America’s traditional allies, not to mention Ukraine. Rightly so.

One reason for caution is the very fact that Putin has been pressing for this for some time, most recently in his Oct 9 phone call with the US president. The Kremlin says preparations are underway, but Trump should ask why it is that Moscow is so interested before he commits to attending.

One attraction is that the plan would exclude Ukraine and Europe, the two objects of Russian aggression and therefore the ones most likely to get in the way of the wider deal Putin is looking for.

Indeed, when US Special Envoy for Peace Missions Steve Witkoff this week delivered an updated ceasefire proposal he worked out with Ukrainian and Europeans leaders in Oslo, the response from Kremlin point-man Yuri Ushakov was dismissive. It lacked substance, he said.

The charade around peace efforts will continue for a while yet; Ushakov said the Russians might be interested in resuming lower-level talks next month, before the possible three-way summit at APEC’s Nov 18 to 19 meeting in Southern China.

But there’s little prospect of a true negotiation until after the winter. Putin believes he has a big enough advantage in the long-range air war that he will emerge next spring with a rump Ukraine that has either capitulated or lies in ruins. He would count either as a win.

WHAT TRUMP AND PUTIN CAN GAIN

Trump doesn’t appear to care about this, as he’s more interested in the potential commercial benefits of a US-Russia reset. So this week he ignored all evidence of daily Russian attacks on civilian targets to say that Russia was “fine” on Ukraine and “hasn’t been doing much”. Witkoff, meeting Putin on Wednesday (Oct 21), even praised Russia’s president as “a humanitarian”.

Two days earlier, one of Putin’s Shahed-style loitering munitions – which circle until locked onto something to strike – had killed six people in a park in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. The victims included a one-year-old girl in a stroller, together with her mother and two more children; 14 others, including other children, were wounded.

Trump no doubt bets he can blame the war’s continuation on Europe and Zelenskyy, and that news of Russian oil tankers steaming toward the US with diesel (to lower prices at the pump) will help him politically ahead of the midterms on Nov 3. Sadly, some American voters may agree, while the gravitas and razzmatazz that a great-powers summit brings could help, too. 

For Putin, the stakes are higher. From the day his armies invaded in 2022, he has made clear that his goal is not just to seize territory, but to change the entire security architecture of Europe in a way that allows Russia to restore influence across the continent and reestablish itself as a great power.

A three-way meeting in China would plant a decisive flag in that quest and is made yet more attractive by the fact that Xi is a close ally. It would be two against one, on Xi’s home turf.

I would happily support giving Putin that win if it would unlock the door to compromise on Ukraine and other points of global tension. But that isn’t how it would work. Putin does not want recognition of Russia as a great power just for reasons of status. He seeks the right to do what great powers do: establish dominance over the nations around them.

A SECOND YALTA CONFERENCE

Hence the excitement in Russia’s state-controlled media over the possibility that Shenzhen could serve as a second Yalta conference.

At the first, in 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin not only created a framework for the United Nations but also agreed to enable the self-determination – via free democratic elections – of the countries they occupied. Stalin, of course, reneged, continuing the de-facto Soviet occupation of what later would become the Warsaw Pact.

To his credit, Trump seems to be pushing discussion of the potential China summit’s agenda toward nuclear arms control, not Ukraine or spheres of influence. This is an important area for diplomacy. It’s also one in which US and Russian interests coincide against China’s.

Xi is building his country’s nuclear arsenal quickly, but it remains far from parity, which would likely make any arms-control deal that would suit Moscow and Washington unattractive to Beijing. How would it then catch up?

That’s one reason the meeting might not happen, which might be for the best given the checkered record that great-power summits enjoy. They tend to depend heavily on both the balance of power on the day and the relative personal strengths and weaknesses of the leaders involved.

Munich, in 1938, needs no further comment. Yalta was shaped by the fact that three wartime allies at the table still had millions of troops on the ground, while Roosevelt was sick with heart disease and a brain tumour (he died soon afterward) and together with Churchill overly trusting of Stalin, who played them. A divided Europe and the Cold War followed.

John F Kennedy’s 1961 summit with Nikita Khrushchev was a diplomatic car crash that would have been better skipped. Khrushchev came away thinking Kennedy weak, unprepared and undisciplined. The Berlin airlift and Cuban missile crisis followed, as the Soviet leader tried to press an advantage he thought he had.

ASSESSING TRUMP’S PROSPECTS

So how to assess Trump’s prospects in Shenzhen, should the summit materialise? The first thing to say is that the US president has a track record in high-profile summitry that is not encouraging. He has repeatedly given leverage away for nothing in his dealings with Putin, proving himself far too trusting of a career intelligence handler.

His red carpet meetings with the Russian leader in Anchorage last year, and with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2018, both suffered from poor preparation akin to Kennedy’s. Trump is notorious for not engaging with detail and there would be just weeks for sherpas to prepare.

Second, the wider circumstances would not be propitious for any American leader. The US is engaged in a draining war that has no obvious path to success in Iran, a country supported by both China and Russia. This gives them leverage in any negotiation, whereas Trump already gave up much of his in Ukraine by withdrawing most US support.

America’s strong alliances in Europe and Asia – formerly a major advantage over both Beijing and Moscow – are weakening, undermined primarily by US actions. Those ties would be further damaged by any agreement made over their heads in China, especially if it were to trade their geopolitical loss for US commercial gain, as Trump is wont to do.

Even if there were no attempt at a second Yalta and a three-way meeting took place in Shenzhen for purely symbolic value, it could still have costs in the form of distraction. For amid all the noise, the world would be led to believe something was being done to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its potential for escalation in Europe, when it wasn’t. That works only for Putin.