History has a way of mocking those who ignore its lessons. As Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin prepare to meet in Alaska, European officials say they will not accept “a second Yalta”. The ghosts of 1945 loom: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin carving up the world over cigars and maps. Yet, the more fitting spectre is Neville Chamberlain, waving his paper of “peace in our time” in 1938, blissfully ignorant of the inferno to come. Europe’s elites, it seems, are torn between yearning for a seat at the Alaskan table and hating the fact that it exposes their own strategic failures.
Let us do away with illusions. Russia is not the Third Reich, despite the fevered analogies of some who see swastikas in every Kremlin shadow. Putin, for all his autocratic rule, is no Hitler, and the war in Ukraine is not at all a replay of the Wehrmacht’s blitz. Moscow’s forces, battered but relentless, continue to gain ground in Donbas, metre by bloody metre. The Ukrainian army, heroic in its defiance, is stretched very close to breaking. Meanwhile, Europe’s grand proclamations of “defeating Russia” now sound increasingly hollow. The EU’s policy, built on the premise that sanctions and surplus hardware donations could topple a nuclear-armed behemoth, now confronts a grim awakening.
The Alaska summit is no mere diplomatic photo-op. It is a landmark. Trump, the iconic dealmaker, and Putin, the chess master of attrition, will sit across a table not as friends or foes, but as pragmatists who know the world bends to power, not platitudes. Europe’s leaders, by contrast, seem content to shout on their moral megaphones about sovereignty and rules-based orders, while their sanctions choke their own economies. Some in Brussels privately admit they would hail a new Yalta as a grand bargain to freeze the lines and call it peace, if only they were invited. But why would they be? Yalta was for victors and titans, not spectators wringing their hands.
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