Alastair Crooke
It seems that Putin has indeed succeeded in finding an exit out from the imposed western cordon sanitaire.
Trump's ascent to a portion of the 'Mythic' has become only too evident. As John Greer has observed:
"It's becoming difficult even for the most dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to go on believing that Trump's political career can be understood in the prosaic terms of 'politics as usual'".
Trump the man, of course, is in no way mythic. He's an elderly, slightly infirm, American real estate oligarch, with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego.
"The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant 'story'. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happen but always are".
Later, myth came to mean stories hinting at a kernel of inner meaning. This doesn't imply a requirement to be factual; yet it is this latter dimension that gives Trump "his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time", Greer suggests. He comes back literally from everything thrown to destroy him.
He becomes what Carl Jung called 'the Shadow'. As Greer writes:
"Rationalists in Hitler's day were consistently confounded by the way the latter brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay Wotan, that much of Hitler's power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype"
Wotan in myth is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife - now here, now there - and works magic. Jung thought it piquant to a degree that an ancient God of storm and frenzy - the long quiescent Wotan - should come to life in the German Youth Movement.
What has this to do with the Alaska summit with President Putin?
Well, Putin seemingly paid due attention to the psychology underlying Trump's sudden request to meet. The Russians treated Trump in a very respectful, courteous and friendly fashion. They implicitly acknowledged Trump's sense of an inner mythic quality - which Steve Witkoff, his longstanding friend, has described as Trump's deep conviction that his 'commanding presence' alone can bend people to his will (and to America's interests). Witkoff added that he agreed with this assessment.
As just one example, the White House meeting with Zelensky and his European fans produced some of the most remarkable political optics perhaps in history. As Simplicius notes,
"Has there ever been anything like this? The entire pantheon of the European ruling class reduced to snivelling children in their school principal's office. No one can deny that Trump has succeeded in veritably 'breaking Europe over his knee'. There is no coming back from this turning point moment, the optics simply cannot be redeemed. The EU's claim to being a geopolitical power is exposed as sham".
Less noticed perhaps - but psychologically crucial - is that Trump seems to recognise in Putin a 'mythic peer'. Despite the two being poles apart in character, nonetheless, Trump seemed to recognise a fellow from the pantheon of putative 'mythic beings'. Watch again the scenes from Anchorage: Trump treats Putin with huge deference and respect. How unlike Trump's disdainful treatment of the Euros.
In Anchorage however, it was Putin who displayed the calm, composed, dominating presence.
Yet what is plain is that Trump's respectful conduct towards Putin has exploded the West's radical demonisation of Russia and the cordon sanitaire erected versus all things Russian. There is no coming back from this other turning point moment - "the optics simply cannot be redeemed". Russia was treated as a peer global power.
What was it all about? A pivot: Kellogg's frozen conflict paradigm is out; the Putin long-term peace plan is in; and tariffs are nowhere mentioned.
What is clear is that Trump has decided - after some reluctance - that he has to do "do Ukraine".
The cold reality is that Trump faces huge pressures: The Epstein Affair stubbornly refuses to fade away. It is set to rear up again after Labor Day in the U.S.
The western Security State narrative of "we are winning", or at least, "they are losing", has been so powerful - and so universally accepted for so long - that it, of itself, creates a huge dynamic, pressing for Trump to persist with the Ukraine war. Facts regularly are twisted to fit this narrative. This dynamic has not yet been broken.
And Trump is trapped too, into supporting the Israeli slaughter - with the images of massacred and starved women and children turning the stomach of the younger, under 35, electoral demographic in the U.S.
These dynamics - and the economic blowback from the 'Shock and Awe' tariff attack to fracture BRICS - together threaten Trump's MAGA base more directly. It is becoming existential. Epstein; the Gaza massacre; the threat of 'more war', and job worries is roiling not just the MAGA faction, but American young voters more generally. They ask, is Trump still one of 'us', or was he always with 'them'.
Without the base behind him, Trump likely will lose the Midterm Congressional elections. Ultra rich donors pay, but cannot substitute.
What emerged from Anchorage therefore is a meagre intellectual framework. Trump minimally decided to no longer stand in the way of a Russian-imposed solution for Ukraine, which is, in any case, really the only solution there can be.
This framework is not a road map to any ultimate solution. It is delusional therefore, as Aurelien outlines, to expect that Trump and Putin were going to 'negotiate' an end to the war in Ukraine, "as though Mr Putin were to pull out a text from his pocket and the two of the them were then to work through it". Trump anyway is not strong on details, and is wont to meander discursively and inconclusively.
"As we get closer to the endgame, the important action is elsewhere, and much of it will be hidden from public view. The broad outlines of the end of the military part of the Ukraine crisis have been visible for a while, even if the details could still change. By contrast, the extremely complex political endgame has only just started, the players are not really sure of the rules, nobody is really sure how many players there are anyway, and the outcome is at the moment as clear as mud", Aurelien opines.
Then why did Trump suddenly 'pivot'? Well it was not because he has had some 'Damascene conversion'. Trump remains a committed Israeli Firster; and secondly, he can't resile from his pursuit of dollar hegemony because that aim, too, is becoming problematic - as the American 'bubble economy' begins to unravel, and the under-30s fidget, living in their parents' basement.
It is to Trump's advantage (for now) to let Russia to 'bring' the EU and Zelensky to some negotiated 'peace' - through force. The U.S. 'China hawks' are increasingly agitating that China is close to an exponential lift-off - both economically and in tech - after which, the U.S. will lose its ability to contain China from global pre-eminence. (It is however probably already too late to stop this).
Putin too, is taking a big risk in offering Trump an off-ramp, through accepting to work towards a stable long-term relationship with the U.S. It is not Finland of 1944, where the Soviet army did force an Armistice.
In Europe, the élite believe that Trump's peace outreach to Putin will fail. Their plan is to ensure it fails by playing along, whilst ensuring through their conditionalities, that no such agreement materialises. Thus proving to Trump that 'Putin is not serious about ending the war'. Thus impelling American escalation.
Trump's part of the bargain with Putin clearly is that he will shoulder managing the European ruling strata (mainly by flooding the info-sphere with contradictory noise), and through containing the American hawks (by pretending he is wooing Russia away from China). Really? Yes, really.
Putin too, faces internal pressures: From Russians convinced that ultimately he will be forced to enter into some form of interim Minsk 3-type outcome (a series of limited ceasefires that would only exacerbate the conflict) rather than achieve 'victory'. Some Russians fear that the blood that has been spent so far may prove to be but a down-payment on more blood to be expended in a few years ahead, as the West rearms Ukraine.
And Putin faces too, the hurdle of Trump viewing his relationship with him through narrow New York real estate 'lense'. He still does not seem to understand that the key question is not so much Ukrainian territories as it is about geo-strategic security. His enthusiasm for a trilateral summit seems to rest on the image of two real estate tycoons playing the board at Monopoly and swapping properties. But it is not like that.
It seems however, that Putin has indeed succeeded in finding an exit out from the imposed western cordon sanitaire. Russia is acknowledged as a great power again, and Ukraine will be settled on the battlefield. The two great nuclear weapons powers are talking to each other. That is important, in itself. Will Trump be able to secure his base? Will 'game over' in Ukraine (if it happens) be enough for MAGA? Will Netanyahu's next genocidal rampage in Gaza explode the Trump 'cope' vis-à-vis MAGA? Very possibly, yes.