The planned Alaska meeting

By Michael Hudson (GlobalSouth)

It is a distortion of reality for the press to depict Russia as at war with Ukraine. It is at war with NATO; Ukraine is the battlefield for this war, the arena.

NATO uses the old police tactic of Good Cop (now ironically played by Trump for the dominant US side – that’s usually the lead cop), with the EU (Britain, Germany and France) being the bad cops, good type casting. 

Putin started this year’s meetings with Trump by saying that the root of their problems is not Ukraine. Ukraine is only an arena in the fight by NATO (led by the US) against Russia, China, and their BRICS and Global South allies.

To solve the fighting in Ukraine, the expansion of NATO must end. That is what Putin demands.

But there seems to be zero chance of this developing. Even if Trump stops US support of NATO’s war in Ukraine, NATO’s roots in the EU bureaucracy (von der Lehen and Kaja Kallas), Britain under Starmer and MI6, Germany under Merz and the Bundeswehr trying to become the new Wehrmacht, and Macron’s France are acting on their own, almost instinctive hatred of Russia.

So there is little chance of agreement, certainly over Russia’s demand that the West recognize its imminent military victory and ability to create a postwar shrunken Ukraine.

NATO has just intruded into the Caucasus with Azerbaijan and Armenia, with US control of the Zangezur Corridor threatening Iran and also China’s Belt and Road trajectory.

And the US has withdrawn from the last vestiges of atomic arms control, while sending nuclear submarines nearer to Russia in at least a symbolically threatening move.

This reflects the Neocon demand for U.S. unipolar hegemony, preventing any country from having its own sovereignty to act independently of the United States.

So my guess is that at the upcoming meetings, the United States has only one tactic – and it is a tactic that Trump loves for his own psychological purposes:

America has only one thing to offer other countries: the (temporary) promise NOT to hurt them. There’s nothing positive to offer, given its de-industrialization and the world’s de-dollarization. (Has Germany ever begun to get back its gold reserves left on deposit with the New York Fed?)

Trump’s generals (the hardest-liner is now in Kiev) and EU/NATO are urging more and tougher sanctions against Russia, mainly to fall on the EU and BRICS countries.