A mad scramble is under way to prepare for the most important superpower meeting in decades
WASHINGTON DC – Less than a week after Donald Trump suddenly announced that Alaska would be the venue for his summit meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday, a mad scramble is underway to prepare both the site and the agenda for the most important superpower meeting in decades.
Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson will serve as the backdrop for Trump to welcome the Russian leader to American soil for the first time in a decade. The base sits on 85,000 acres of land that were included in the US purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867, and today houses more than 5,000 active military and civilian personnel.
In deciding to host the summit on US soil, the Trump administration rejected other possible locations, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia (suggested earlier this year as a possible venue), and even Hungary. The list of potential sites was limited due to the arrest warrant for war crimes that Putin faces from the International Criminal Court. But the decision to host the face-off in Alaska means the Air Force Base has just days to prepare for a summit that, under normal circumstances, would have been months in the planning.
Security on the base is, of course, guaranteed. But getting to Anchorage and securing accommodation there during the peak holiday season is proving testing for the armies of officials, journalists, lobbyists, and diplomats who hope to be there in time for Friday.
From its snowy outpost near Anchorage, Elmendorf-Richardson serves as the headquarters of “America’s Arctic Warriors” and is described by the Pentagon as the country’s “premier power projection platform”.
The biggest question going into the summit is which of the two leaders will seek to project a greater degree of power at their meeting on the base. Even top Trump officials conceded this week that the ball was very much in Putin’s court, days after he eagerly accepted Trump’s invitation.
The White House says the summit will be a “listening exercise” for Trump, as he sounds Putin out over an elusive ceasefire and peace agreement for Ukraine.
“We’re going to have a meeting with Putin, and … probably within the first two minutes I’ll know exactly whether or not a deal can be made,” Trump told reporters on Monday. When pressed on how he could possibly make that prediction, Trump scoffed. “Because that’s what I do. I make deals,” he said.
Similar language was echoed on Tuesday by Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, who will be on hand in Alaska alongside the veteran Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Rejecting criticism over both the haste with which the summit is being prepared and the decision to welcome Putin to an American military base, Rubio insisted the US was making no concessions. “The [US] President feels like, look, I gotta look at this guy across the table. I need to see him face to face, I need to hear him, I need to make an assessment by looking at him,” he told New York’s WABC Radio.
Rubio indicated that Trump – who in April voiced the suspicion that Putin “doesn’t want to stop the war” and later suggested he was “just tapping me along” – now wants to get the personal measure of his interlocutor in order to make final decisions. “A meeting is what you do to kind of figure out, make your decision. I want to have all the facts. I want to look the guy in the eye. So honestly, I think we’re going to know very early in the meeting whether this thing has any chance of success or not,” he said.
With Ukraine and its European allies terrified that Trump will be wooed into agreeing to the dismemberment of Ukraine in exchange for Russian promises of renewed economic co-operation with the United States, the Joint Air Base in Alaska serves as an extraordinary venue for the meeting. The base’s official history notes that “as uncertain wartime relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated into the Cold War”, Elmendorf-Richardson witnessed “a major buildup of air defence forces” and became “the nerve centre for all air defence operations in Alaska”.
There is precedent for Friday’s meeting to be held at the base. In January 1971, President Richard Nixon welcomed Japanese Emperor Hirohito for a brief summit meeting there. It was the first time any reigning Japanese Emperor had ever set foot on foreign soil, and Nixon noted that 25 years before the meeting, Japan had been under postwar American military occupation.
Trump himself visited Elmendorf-Richardson in February 2019, following his fruitless second summit meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un in Vietnam. Addressing 100 service members on the base, he joked that he had been given a choice: “I can stay on the plane and relax as we fuel up…Or, I said, ‘how good are they out there?’ Somebody looked at me and said ‘they’re the best’. I said ‘all right, let’s go’”.
How quickly Trump decides to depart Elmendorf-Richardson on Friday may prove to be a key clue regarding the summit’s success or failure. Putin aides have made it clear that the Russian leader intends to draw Trump into a discussion about the “root causes” of the conflict in Ukraine, by which he means the very existence of Ukraine as a sovereign state, and the presence of Nato troops along Russia’s borders.
Trump is tantalised by economic opportunities for the US that could be exploited in the event that Ukraine-related sanctions on Putin, his top officials, and leading Russian industries are relaxed. “Russia has a very valuable piece of land”, Trump told reporters on Monday, while musing about the possibilities that would exist “if Putin would go toward business instead of war”.
