Why the Trump–Putin Alaska Summit Could Redefine the Post-Cold War Order
A historic meeting in Anchorage could end three decades of neo-conservative interventionism.
The Alaska summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is more than diplomacy; it is a clear sign that the era of easy victories is over.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska on Friday to decide Ukraine’s fate — without Volodymyr Zelensky present.
It signals that NATO, the military alliance dominating global security since the Cold War, can no longer impose outcomes at will.
For three decades after the Soviet collapse, NATO’s dominance went largely unchallenged. The alliance swelled from 16 to 32 members, pulling in former Warsaw Pact states and advancing to Russia’s borders — despite 1990 assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev that it would move “not one inch eastward.”
Those assurances, recorded in U.S. diplomatic archives and confirmed by former U.S. ambassador Jack Matlock, are disputed by some policymakers, but were understood in Moscow as a strategic commitment.
Current tensions between Washington and Moscow did not begin with Russia’s 2022 invasion. They escalated sharply nearly a decade earlier, when Ukraine became the center of a contest over whether it would align with the West or remain in Russia’s orbit.
For decades, a bipartisan foreign-policy elite in Washington — neoconservatives on the right and interventionist Democrats like Hillary Clinton — treated regime change as standard practice.
After 1991, Russia under Vladimir Putin became the ultimate prize: weaken the Kremlin, replace its leadership, lock in a Western periphery.
As Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton advanced NATO’s “open door” and funded “democracy promotion” across the post-Soviet space. Washington cultivated opposition movements; by 2014 the project reached Kyiv.
A leaked call caught Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland telling Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, “Yats is the guy,” weeks before Arseniy Yatsenyuk became prime minister. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham stood on the Maidan pledging support.
The elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, fell; a West-aligned cabinet took power; confrontation with Moscow became policy. Though out of office, Clinton remained influential in the foreign-policy establishment, her hawkish posture echoing neoconservative appetite for redraw-the-map interventions.
Weeks later, Russia annexed Crimea, citing a hastily organized referendum in which local authorities claimed 97 percent voted to join the Russian Federation. Moscow framed the move as protecting its Black Sea Fleet and the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority; Washington and its allies called it an illegal land grab.
The annexation marked the end of NATO’s quiet, incremental encroachment and triggered an overt military buildup along Russia’s frontier. The alliance moved troops, armor, and missile systems into Poland and the Baltic states under the banner of “enhanced forward presence,” while U.S. warships made regular Black Sea deployments.
Joint exercises like Anakonda and Sea Breeze expanded in scale, rehearsing war scenarios on Russia’s doorstep. In Moscow’s eyes, what the West had long framed as defensive posture had become preparation for direct confrontation — confirming security fears the West had promised to allay in 1990.
From 2015 onward, Ukraine was steadily absorbed into NATO’s security architecture without formal membership.
U.S. and allied instructors trained Ukrainian troops under the Joint Multinational Training Group at Yavoriv, near the Polish border. Washington authorized lethal aid packages, including Javelin anti-tank missiles and advanced radar systems.
NATO integrated Ukraine into its intelligence and communications networks, and joint exercises expanded to simulate high-intensity war with Russia. Parallel to these efforts, the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency funded biological research facilities across Ukraine under the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program — officially to secure pathogens, but seen by Moscow as forward-positioned dual-use sites.
By 2021, Ukraine functioned as a de facto NATO outpost: armed, trained, and wired into Western command structures, with allied military and intelligence presence on the ground. For Moscow, the “not one inch” had become hundreds of miles, backed by firepower and infrastructure.
In February 2022, the standoff crossed its final threshold. The Kremlin announced a “special military operation” aimed, in its own terms, at demilitarizing Ukraine, preventing NATO expansion, and “de-Nazifying” elements of the Ukrainian security apparatus it accused of targeting ethnic Russians in the Donbas.
Moscow presented it as a preemptive strike to neutralize an armed Western satellite on its border, citing NATO’s broken assurances, the 2014 coup, and eight years of low-intensity conflict in Eastern Ukraine.
In the West, these motives were dismissed as pretexts. The war was reduced to an “unprovoked invasion” by a man bent on empire. Putin was likened to Hitler; NATO’s role in escalating tensions was erased.
Russian outlets including RT and Sputnik were banned across the EU, and dissent from the official narrative was treated as disloyalty.
The “rules-based international order” became the rallying cry — a moral banner under which NATO armed Ukraine, sanctioned Russia, and declared Ukraine’s borders non-negotiable.
The public, primed by years of media framing and wartime slogans, absorbed the narrative quickly and treated dissent as heresy.
But the script was not new.
For decades, Washington and NATO have perfected the art of creating the “folk devil” — Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad — through sustained propaganda, then moving to depose him under the guise of humanitarian necessity. Each time, the regime fell.
This time, the target was a nuclear-armed state with a deep industrial base and a global commodities lifeline.
The playbook failed.
Despite unprecedented sanctions, Russia’s economy adapted. Its forces still hold Crimea and large parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Much of the Global South has refused to side with NATO. And in the West, publics are showing fatigue with an open-ended proxy war that has failed to achieve its central aim: breaking the Kremlin.
That failure has left Washington and NATO facing a choice they spent two years denying: negotiate with Vladimir Putin or accept a frozen conflict that cements Russia’s territorial gains.
The “defend democracy at all costs” rhetoric has quietly given way to backchannel diplomacy, as European economies strain under energy shocks and U.S. political will fractures ahead of another election. The Alaska summit is a clear signal that the regime-change project against Moscow is over — at least for now.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet not as victor and vanquished, but as two leaders holding cards the other cannot simply take.
For NATO’s architects, it could mark a bitter end to three decades of expansion, intervention, and campaigns that once toppled governments with ease.
For Washington’s foreign-policy establishment, it is an admission that the old playbook has limits — and that in Putin’s Russia, they have met an adversary they cannot break.
The scene in Alaska will be a far cry from the optimism of 1990, when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” if Moscow accepted German reunification.
That promise was broken almost immediately. What followed was a steady march of bases, alliances, and interventions — each step rationalized as defensive, each one bringing NATO closer to Russia’s borders.
Three decades later, the two men meeting in Anchorage embody the consequences of that breach.
Donald Trump arrives as the first U.S. president since the Cold War to openly question NATO’s endless commitments; Vladimir Putin arrives as the leader of a Russia that has withstood the sanctions, media campaigns, and proxy wars meant to unseat him.
Between them lies the wreckage of a foreign-policy consensus that believed it could expand without cost, intervene without limit, and dictate terms without consequence.
In that sense, the Alaska summit is not just a negotiation over Ukraine. It is the reckoning for a strategy born in a single, broken assurance — a reminder that promises made between great powers are not easily forgotten, and that history has a way of closing its own accounts.
By Nick Holt