We barely had time to digest the Alaska meeting before Trump rushed us into yet another spectacle, this time framed as a headlong march toward some “final peace plan.”
My skepticism after Alaska has only grown. The slogan Pursuing Peace on the wall where the two leaders sat fooled no one—except perhaps the gullible. A handful of serious observers (Jan Oberg, Transnational Foundation for Peace & Future Research) pointed out what the mainstream ignored: this was not a summit of peacemakers but of military commanders. There was no talk of genuine, positive peace. The venue itself—a military base—said it all. And when Trump greeted the Russian president, he could not resist flexing America’s military muscle with the roar of warplanes overhead.
Meanwhile, the analysts busied themselves with trivia: quips, body language, Lavrov’s USSR hoodie, the skipped lunch. All noise, no substance. The single meaningful fact—though Trump won’t admit it (preferring to dump blame on Biden)—is that representatives of two warring sides in a proxy war sat down face-to-face. In this madhouse of an era, even that is no small thing. But the real knot of what was agreed—if anything—remains tightly wound. And notably absent from the conversation were the United Nations and its peacekeeping mechanisms. Instead, everything stayed at the level of personal backchannels and intra-Western whispers.
The sequence—phone calls, then a White House meeting—was meant to signal “progress,” proof that Putin had signed on to Trump’s plan. Yet as of August 19, 10 a.m. CET, the Western leaders themselves (each with sinking approval ratings) still seemed clueless as to what was actually agreed. Their endless parroting about buying weapons, strengthening Ukraine’s military, or deploying troops as future “peacekeepers” was nothing new. Nothing they said pointed toward a reckoning with reality: the West’s own role as instigator and party to the war.
The absurdity runs deeper. They still chant “peace through strength,” as if this Orwellian formula were wisdom. Trump, meanwhile, gleefully rubs his hands over another fat weapons deal with Zelensky—a man who, beyond fattening his offshore accounts, has bankrupted and sold off the remainder of Ukraine not already under Russian control.
And then comes the crowning farce: “security guarantees.” Nobody knows what the phrase means, who could credibly provide them, or whether Moscow has shifted even an inch from the goals it set in 2022. The Kremlin, wisely, stays silent or issues curt, polite statements. Why should it alter course because a handful of humiliated European leaders—empty reputations, empty budgets, threadbare armies—lined up like schoolboys at Trump’s desk? Look at their faces in the family photo: a tableau of weak men pretending to be powerful, each suspecting the other of being someone else’s puppet. The irony is that none of them is master of his own house. Trump no more than the rest. Yes, he can rearrange the White House furniture, but the real levers of American power are beyond his reach. He too is a marionette, jerked about by invisible hands visible only to those willing to think rationally.
And so he cannot make the only decision that matters: a full US withdrawal from the war it helped provoke; acknowledgment of its role; an end to arms shipments (even the paid-for ones); agreement in the Security Council to deploy real peacekeepers in Ukraine; and pressure on NATO to stop toying with Article 5—a path that leads not to peace but to world war. Trump is as impotent as he is erratic. His handshake with Zelensky over $100 billion in “security guarantees” looks less like statesmanship than a mafia racket.
The loudest “voice” in the Oval Office was mute: the huge map of Ukraine spread out with its lines of territorial division. That single image revealed everything—these people either understand nothing, or they play the fool. They cling to territorial formulas, blind to the deeper causes of the conflict—the ones Moscow has insisted upon from the beginning.
A real step toward peace would start elsewhere: a Security Council resolution; blue-helmet peacekeepers drawn from uninvolved states (certainly not NATO); perhaps even a revival of the OSCE, drowning though it is in irrelevance. But Moscow has learned too much from Minsk to be lured into Minsk 3.0. If there is to be a new European—and global—security architecture, it could begin in Ukraine. But it will not be designed by the weak, unimaginative men we saw playing at power in the Oval Office.
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