Summits between heads of state are high-stakes gambles to achieve breakthrough solutions. Typically, they are judged on whether they help resolve an intractable international issue. But sometimes, their most consequential impact is on the domestic political standing of one or both of the summit’s participants. And U.S. President Donald Trump’s summit last month in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin is of this mold: it strengthened Putin, and in doing so has prolonged both the war in Ukraine and his hold on power.
The meeting in Anchorage has parallels to the 1986 summit between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland. Then, as now, an American leader and a Russian one met to resolve a major foreign policy challenge—in 1986, ending an arms race, and last month, ending the war in Ukraine. In both cases, they failed. The talks in Iceland collapsed when Reagan refused to scuttle his Strategic Defense Initiative, a proposed program that would neutralize Soviet nuclear missiles before they struck their targets. Alaska ended without a deal to end Russia’s invasion.
But there the parallels diverge. Both summits may have had profound consequences for the Kremlin, yet those consequences could not be more different. For Gorbachev, the Iceland summit hastened the end of his country. He returned to the Kremlin weakened from his failure to stop Reagan’s program, and his subsequent decisions paved the way for the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Putin, by contrast, has emerged triumphant. Trump rolled out the red carpet for the Russian leader in Anchorage and spoke gushingly of their “fantastic relationship.” Putin made no concessions, and Trump shifted the responsibility for ending the fighting to Ukraine: “Now it is really up to President Zelensky to get it done,” he said in an interview with Fox News.
Although Putin did not face any strong opposition before Alaska, he now enjoys a glow of success for, by all appearances, having won over the American president. According to a late August survey by the independent Russian polling firm Levada, 79 percent of Russians view the summit as a success for Putin, and 51 percent are more optimistic for an improvement in relations with the United States. After the summit, Russian media did not have to put out false pronouncements to highlight Putin’s diplomatic triumph: it broadcast the real event, along with Western commentary on Putin’s victory. Stronger than ever, Putin can continue his war against Ukraine for as long as it takes to win on his terms.
DEATH KNELL FOR AN EMPIRE
When the Politburo elected Gorbachev general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1985, the country was in desperate need of reform. The Soviet military was bogged down in Afghanistan, a conflict that Gorbachev called “a bleeding wound,” and incompetent central planning was dragging down the Soviet Union’s economic growth rate. Détente with the United States, which lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, had failed to ease competition between the superpowers. And inequality, corruption, and scarcity were rampant.
Gorbachev promised hard-liners and reformists alike that he would fix these grave issues. Yet he promised to do so not by fundamentally changing the Soviet system. Instead, he said he would succeed by increasing productivity and eliminating wasteful spending. He reassured the Soviet elite that the Communist Party would remain strong and in control. Rather than upend the party’s central control, he would secure new resources by improving relations with the West, which would allow Moscow to curtail defense spending and ramp up economic modernization. To that end, Gorbachev asked the Politburo to support negotiations with Washington on limiting each side’s stockpile of strategic nuclear weapons. The Soviet security elite agreed to back an agreement, but only if the Americans disavowed defenses against strategic nuclear weapons as part of it. The offense-defense balance, they warned, could not tip in Washington’s favor.
That is why Gorbachev went to Iceland: he would show the world and wary party colleagues at home that he could stop the arms race and rejuvenate the Soviet economy by unlocking the conditions for growth. But he failed spectacularly and publicly. The world watched on television in real time as Reagan refused to cancel his Strategic Defense Initiative and Gorbachev left empty-handed. When he returned to Moscow, he had to defend himself before a fractious Politburo, with conservatives continuing to demand that Washington disavow strategic defenses as part of a deal. Gorbachev faced a divided leadership with competing demands on him.
Ultimately, he chose to rely upon his core reformist supporters in order to save his power. In 1987, Gorbachev agreed to sign an Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Reagan even though it did not constrain Washington’s missile defenses. He pushed aside the Politburo’s conservatives and began leaning more on moderate leaders and advisers, especially Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. Over the next several years, Gorbachev pursued a sweeping series of economic and political changes that allowed for quasi-private businesses and greater autonomy for the 15 constituent Soviet republics, Russia included. But instead of unleashing an economic dynamism that would silence his opponents, Gorbachev’s changes broke the Soviet system without creating a functional new one. Food lines grew longer, Soviet cities were shaken by hunger riots, and wage payments began to fall behind.
In trying to preserve his power, Gorbachev destroyed the structure that gave it to him. And by weakening the tools of Soviet political control, he opened up space for nationalist movements and leaders, including Boris Yeltsin in Russia, to gain strength. Eventually, these movements overwhelmed what was left of a decaying state. In December 1991, the Soviet Union passed into history.
WITH TIME ON HIS SIDE
Putin’s Russia is not Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. There is no collective leadership constraining the Kremlin. Putin does not answer to a Politburo or any powerful committee: he presides over a personalist authoritarian system in which he is the sole source of power. The public officials and business leaders in Putin’s orbit owe their positions, their influence, and their wealth to their loyalty and service to him alone. But that does not mean he is invulnerable. Russian state propaganda is formidable, but sufficient economic hardship could disturb the quiescence of Russian society. And it’s unclear how the Russian elite might respond if circumstances forced Putin to cut off their economic benefits.
So far, the president has managed these risks well. After more than three years of war, the Russian economy has not crashed under the pressure of sanctions. Instead, the country’s skilled economic leaders managed to keep growth above four percent last year, buoyed by high defense spending. Employment, consumption, and access to credit remain high. It is hard to gauge accurate public opinion in an authoritarian police state, but there are no outward signs that discontent within the elite or society at large threatens Putin’s rule.
Still, extensive government spending to strengthen the economy has led to high inflation—nearly ten percent in 2024 and over eight percent this year. And Putin’s war carries significant opportunity costs for Russia. International sanctions limiting the country’s trade, investment, and access to technology hamper productivity and growth. Russia can sell oil to China and India, but its limited access to global markets means it does so at a discount. The Russian army can recruit new contract soldiers, but it must offer substantial sign-on bonuses and ever higher payments to entice them, and those contracts are driving labor shortages and inflation.
In Alaska, Trump did nothing to push back against Putin’s narrative.
Putin’s performance in Alaska helps obviate these pressures. True, he did not secure agreement to some long-standing demands or the business deals that the Trump administration had hinted at. But in the eyes of Russia’s elite and ordinary citizens, he succeeded nonetheless. He broke out of the isolation that the West had imposed upon him, defiantly landing in the United States despite sanctions and international arrest warrants for war crimes. He delayed and has possibly entirely avoided new crushing sanctions on Russian oil. And he reminded the world that Moscow stands resolute in its demands that Ukraine cede not just territory but its autonomy and sovereignty as well.
In fact, the summit helped Putin legitimize Moscow’s grievances, giving Russians who might doubt the wisdom of the invasion reason believe that it was, as Putin promised, just. Addressing reporters in Anchorage against a backdrop that read “Pursuing Peace,” Putin spoke of Russia’s “legitimate concerns,” of his desire to see a “just balance of security in Europe and in the world,” and of “the need to eliminate all the primary roots, the primary causes” of the fighting in Ukraine. Trump did nothing to push back against this narrative. Indeed, the American president appears to have accepted Putin’s contention that Moscow should have a say over Ukrainian territorial integrity and Western security guarantees. Putin flew home having demonstrated to his subjects that he was right all along, that they must not waiver, and that he will win for them.
For Putin, the summit was never about pursuing peace in Ukraine. His aim all along has been to bend the international system to his will and to preserve his monopoly on power at home. Since his first incursions into Ukraine in 2014, Putin has played the long game. He has always believed that time is on his side. The Alaska summit bought him even more time—and gave him a stronger hand for achieving military victory.
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