The Art of the Summit

I recently appeared on a national panel to discuss the Trump-Putin Summit. To say that I was outnumbered on the panel would be an understatement. At some point, it occurred to me that members of the panel seemed to hate Trump more than they loved America. Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is real, my friends. 

As lopsided as the panel was, truth remained truth. But truth never gets in the way of TDS. The overarching narrative of certain panel members involved a rampant oversimplification of an intricate process. “Trump failed,” they gloated. “The war didn’t end Friday!” they shrilled. “There was no deal!” they opined.

Let’s be clear: Had a nearly four-year conflict been resolved in a single three-hour summit a mere six months after Trump took office, the world would not be talking about a Nobel Peace Prize … the call would be for sainthood! 

History was nonetheless made as Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss an end to the Ukraine War. A war the Ukrainians did not ask for. A war the Russians did not expect to go past the Biden years. Putin is the aggressor, Ukraine is the underdog, and the devastation must end. 

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, and since then, over 250,000 Russian troops have been killed, with another 700,000 wounded. Nearly a million casualties just on the Russian side are met by Ukraine’s estimated 100,000 soldiers killed, along with roughly 14,000 civilians. 

The force-on-force fighting in Ukraine is on a scale that Europe has not seen since WWII. Yet somehow those with TDS in our politics and punditry believe that Trump is wrong for daring to speak to Putin, and even more wrong for not ending the war by teatime. 

Ask yourself: What happens if Trump does NOT speak with him? I’ll tell you what: the killing continues. The U.S. is playing the role of mediator, a diplomatic approach known as “shuttle diplomacy.” The only way that works is if the mediator goes back and forth between the parties. 

In our modern era, there are very few examples of negotiated peace for large-scale conflict. The Korean War serves as a testament to the slavishly ponderous process involved in getting two warring factions to the table. The peace negotiations that ultimately resulted in an armistice for the Korean peninsula took over two years to reach their conclusion. The Dayton Peace Accords that brought an end to the multi-year war in Bosnia culminated after a 21-day grueling summit with all parties present. Today’s soundbite Democrats want results in real time. The TDS left demands an end to the fighting in the time it takes to make a TikTok video. Even they don’t believe the fallacy of what they demand. 

But let’s think about the events that led up to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. In 2014, during the Obama-Biden administration, Putin simply decided he wanted the Crimean Peninsula. That’s akin to Cuba deciding it simply wants Florida. Putin annexed Crimea and suddenly had ports and land bridges to key waterways. In 2021, Biden took office and buffooned U.S. foreign policy into the debacle of the pullout from Afghanistan, the kowtowing to Iran, the damage to the Abraham Accords, and the sidelining of Israel. Putin smelled weakness and massed on Ukraine’s eastern border. Biden’s only foreign policy plan was to equivocate about “minor incursions.” Biden said “Don’t,” but Putin “did” anyway. So, Biden opened the endless checkbook, cranked up the autopen, and here we are three-and-a-half years later. 

Six months post-Biden, the world has now seen a first layer of negotiations, coupled with a revamped NATO, a galvanized European Union, and a leader in the White House. Is it any wonder why Putin came to a U.S. military base in Alaska, standing on ground that the U.S. bought from Russia for pennies on the dollar, and had to watch a B-2 Stealth bomber fly over his head? It’s a whole new day for U.S. foreign policy. 

History dictates that broad conflict in Europe rarely remains a non-issue for the North American continent. The Atlantic Ocean is no real barrier when Europe explodes. It always follows a tried-and-true pattern: cross-border rivalries, ethnic identities that transcend borders, aggressive posturing by a domineering figure, paired against feckless leadership believing that it can reason with the tyrant to prevent the conflict, only to find that the tyrant cannot be trusted because deceitfulness is in the very nature of all tyrants. 

Fecklessness got us here. Feckless leadership who watched, wished, and wrung their bony hands, hoping that this time a policy of appeasement would actually work. So appeasement and fecklessness occurred, and we now have war in Europe again. Fecklessness got us here. Leadership will now get us out. 

As an attorney, I know that mediation goes back and forth to an end point in which no one is happy, but everyone is resolved. 

As a soldier, I know that war is a devastating experience that cannot be allowed to continue in perpetuity. 

As a politico, I understand that deep-rooted political bias too often gets in the way of reasonable and cogent analysis. 

And as an American who studies history,y I see parallels to past conflicts and know that we must regard our history well, or be doomed to repeat it. 

Trump is engaging the process. This most recent summit is one of a string of shuttle diplomacy efforts that will occur. The U.S. carries a big stick, with a buffet of penalties designed to pressure both sides to find an arrangement that ends the killing … and he should. It’s called leadership. It’s called strength. It’s the only way. It’s the right way. 

It’s the art of the summit.