Wildly chaotic: For Trump, flashy summits first; grunt work next

First, President Donald Trump rolled out the red carpet for President Vladimir Putin of Russia for a high-stakes summit in Alaska. Then he brought the president of Ukraine and seven other European leaders to the White House for an extraordinary gathering to discuss an end to the war.

Now comes the grunt work.

Trump, in the past week, has effectively flipped the traditional diplomatic process on its head. After two critical meetings in four days aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, American and European diplomats scrambled to come up with detailed proposals for security guarantees and other sticking points that could upend any momentum to secure peace.

Already, major gaps were becoming evident, including whether Russia would countenance US security guarantees for Ukraine, and whether Putin was serious about meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy face to face.

Ironing out the details typically happens between staffers and diplomats before leaders step in to finalise the agreement. But Trump, ever one to toss out norms and traditions, went big last week in Alaska with Putin, then again at the White House on Monday, without any breakthroughs to announce. Now, with Russia continuing to hammer Ukraine and no sign that Trump or Putin sees a ceasefire as a precondition for a deal, the process risks devolving into a diplomatic version of trench warfare.

So far, at least, Putin has a free hand to continue his war against his neighbour without immediate concern for further penalty.

“In a normal American administration, you have all kinds of preparation,” said Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “This is very unusual.” He added: “The risk I see is that he doesn’t prepare the details. My impression is that he wants a deal. He wants any deal so he can claim, ‘I solved another war.’ But the details matter.”

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said Tuesday that Trump’s approach was a much-needed break from the “status quo.”

“Thanks to President Trump’s efforts, we finally have movement after years of deadly gridlock,” she said at a press briefing.

But the statements coming out of the Trump administration did not always line up with the information coming out of Russia. In her comments to reporters, Leavitt said Putin had promised to meet with Zelenskyy in the coming weeks. But Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, played down the prospect of such a meeting.

Trump, for his part, said Tuesday that he felt Putin was “tired” of the war. Yet Russia launched an overnight attack against Ukrainian energy and transport infrastructure, with 270 drones.

On security guarantees, Trump said he had ruled out deploying US troops to Ukraine but would be open to providing air support for troops from other European nations. On multiple occasions, Russia has flatly rejected the idea of an international force on its borders.

“We’ve got the European nations, and they’ll front-load it,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News Tuesday morning. “They want to have, you know, boots on the ground.”

Still, diplomacy is a messy process, and the recent summits were only the latest attempts by Trump to jump-start talks, a process made more urgent perhaps by his open campaign for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Even Trump on Tuesday acknowledged the challenging road ahead.

“This one is the one that’s the most difficult, and I thought it would be an easy one,” Trump said in the Fox News interview. “So I hope President Putin is going to be good, and if he’s not, that’s going to be a rough situation.”

Some foreign policy experts questioned Trump’s shifting stances. In just a week, he threatened to impose “severe consequences” on Russia if Putin did not agree to a ceasefire, only to adopt Putin’s preferred approach of negotiating a sprawling peace agreement that would involve Ukraine ceding territory. He has dropped a threat of sanctioning Putin, instead arguing that the Russian leader was ready to negotiate and end the fighting.

“He’s been all over the place,” said Charles A. Kupchan, a Europe adviser on the National Security Council in the Obama and Clinton administrations. Kupchan did commend Trump for engaging with Putin, saying it was long overdue to secure a tangible diplomatic off-ramp for the conflict.

But he said the lack of coordination and cohesive strategy meant that many crucial details still needed to be worked out.

“It’s hard to imagine a kind of diplomatic game plan that has unfolded in such a chaotic fashion,” Kupchan said. “It’s been a mess.”

@The New York Times