Putin left Alaska with exactly what he wanted—more time
Marc Thiessen, a right-wing sage at the Washington Post, provided many specifics last week in a column headlined “How Trump can win in Alaska: The president has the right plan for his summit with Vladimir Putin on Ukraine.”
Almost every line in his remarkable column was wrong, except for this one, “Putin’s goal is to buy more time.”
“To avoid this trap, all Trump has to do is hold firm to his stated position that both sides need to agree to a ceasefire now. Once a ceasefire is in place, there will be time to talk about exchanging territory,” he predicted.
“If Putin refuses, expect Trump to walk away, pull the trigger on secondary tariffs on Russia’s oil sector and increase arms sales to Ukraine (paid for by NATO allies). At the Kennedy Center on Wednesday (August 13), Trump was asked what would happen if Putin did not end the war after their meeting. He answered, ‘There will be very severe consequences,’” Thiessen wrote.
“The definition of success in Alaska will be an immediate ceasefire that stops the bloodshed, coupled with agreement to negotiate the details of a longer-term resolution. Trump understands that anything else would be a prescription for months of additional negotiations, which would only give Putin what he wants,” said Thiessen.
Putin got exactly what he wanted in Anchorage—no ceasefire, no sanctions and more time. Trump, who is campaigning for a Nobel Prize, achieved nothing.
On Monday at the White House, Trump was captured on a hot mic talking to French President Emmanuel Macron and gushing about Putin, “I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds.”
And Thiessen? He posted this remarkable column Wednesday in which he pretends that he never wrote anything about the need for a ceasefire and never predicted that Trump would impose severe consequences without one. He doesn’t mention that his predictions about the Alaska meeting were entirely wrong.
Thiessen now claims that Trump has put Putin in a bind by not having a ceasefire.
Trump changes his so-called position on Ukraine all the time, depending upon who he is talking to, but Thiessen finds a coherent thread where none exists.
“Putin clearly relished his return to the world stage in Alaska. But it came at a price—because Trump’s Washington summit has put the onus for peace back on Russia,” writes Thiessen, who must think no one remembers the declarations he made a week ago.