The Curse of Anchorage

Does the US-China confrontation of March 2021 provide a hint of what lies ahead this coming Friday?

Summit diplomacy does not have a great history in Anchorage. A March 2021 encounter between senior officials of the US and China didn’t go well. It put down a marker that tainted the relationship between the two superpowers for all four years of the Biden Administration. Will the upcoming August 15, 2025, meeting between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin break the Curse of Anchorage?

Several lessons from 2021 are worth remembering:

• First, the earlier meeting was not a leader-to-leader summit. The US side was represented by Secretary of State, Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. The Chinese side featured Foreign Minister, Wang Yi and Foreign Affairs Director, Yang Jiechi. While both presidents, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, played important roles in scripting their proxies, the give and take between the two teams was delegated to senior underlings.

• Second, Anchorage 2021 was surprisingly confrontational. The US and China had just signed the so-called Phase I Trade Deal fourteen months earlier in January 2020 and there was hope that this framework of negotiated engagement could be improved upon. Instead, the Blinken-Sullivan team was quick to broaden the debate from trade to contentious issues highly critical of China, like human rights and security concerns.

• Third, the Chinese came prepared to respond in kind. Wang and Yang were quick to demonstrate their “wolf warrior” credentials with critical remarks directed at the recent record of the United States, making explicit reference to systemic racism in the aftermath of the Geoge Floyd murder in May 2020 and to the attempted political insurrection that had occurred just two months earlier on January 6.

• Fourth, both sides drew the integrity and values of the other side into sharp question. The Chinese expressed indignation over the condescending traits of American hypocrisy as a so-called bastion of democracy, while the US team countered with a strong defense of the red lines of universal values. Neither side accepted the principled position of the other.

The circumstances are very different as Donald Trump and Vladamir Putin gather in Anchorage this coming Friday. For starters, they meet as principals, not through proxies, in the heat of kinetic conflict, more than three years into the Russo-Ukrainian War sparked by Putin’s brutal and illegal invasion of Ukraine’s sovereign territory. The US-China trade war, which framed the backdrop of the March 2021 meeting, pales by comparison. While the stakes of a bilateral economic confrontation seemed ominously high at the time, the geopolitical implications of the war in Ukraine have far more profound implications for European and world peace.

Of equal significance is the special strain of chemistry between Trump and Putin. Unlike Anchorage 2021, when the two sides faced each other with equal vigor at the negotiating table, Donald Trump has a history of being soft in his approach to Valdimir Putin. That was certainly the case in the Helsinki Summit between the two leaders in July 2018, when Trump took Putin’s side and dismissed US intelligence findings of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. It was also the case more recently when Trump broadsided Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on February 28 in the Oval Office of the White House and then subsequently waffled with US support of military equipment to Ukraine.

Moreover, there is another important reason to believe that Trump will not seek confrontation with Putin over the Ukrainian situation. Unlike March 2021, when the US side was eager for confrontation with China, Donald Trump’s legacy gambit has long focused on the deal — specifically on the deal count — as his principal metric of success. Ending the war in Ukraine on day one was supposed to be the signature deal of his inauguration; his failure to deliver on that promise is a major blemish on his deal-focused aspirations.

If anything, that failure has prompted Trump to up the ante on the deal count. Post-April 2 Liberation day, he promised 90 trade deals in 90 days. The Big Beautiful Bill was his defining fiscal deal. Repression of universities and law firms could only be resolved through deals. More recently, Nvidia and AMD struck revenue-sharing deals with Trump to gain market access in China. And so on.

Of course, Trump’s critics ridicule his deals as public relations gimmicks — at best, frameworks that lack strategic buy-in that requires long and arduous negotiations and compromise. The President, of course, is dismissive of such blowback, increasingly fixated on the potential of two trophy deals — Harvard and China. If he can cut deals with America’s pre-eminent university and its peer superpower competitor, Donald Trump’s self-anointed legacy as dealmaker-in-chief will all but be enshrined. A deal with Russia would be icing on that cake.

Most superpower summits are well scripted, with ample staff support focused on detailed strategizing and preparation. That may be Putin’s style — but certainly not Trump’s, who literally calls all the shots. By lowering the bar on this summit to a “listening exercise,” as well as raising the possibility of land swaps as part of a negotiated settlement between Russia and Ukraine, Donald Trump is hardly projecting any strength ahead of the Anchorage meeting. Meanwhile, Vladamir Putin continues to grind ahead in his brutal campaign in Eastern Ukraine. While it certainly appears as if Putin has the upper hand, the Curse of Anchorage warns us to be wary of the unexpected.