The outcome of the Alaska summit, on August 15, 2025, was not the product of a diplomatic contest between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, or the United States and Russia, or the U.S. and Europe. Neither was the outcome of talks that Mr. Trump held with European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The biggest unknown variable impacting the question of peace was how much Mr. Trump would concede to Russia. While he acceded to Mr. Putin’s demand for no ceasefire without a permanent peace agreement and no North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Ukraine, Mr. Trump’s campaign platform in 2024 had promised much more — an immediate end to the war.
Mr. Trump could deliver this and satisfy his base by offering the requisite incentives to Moscow in exchange for halting its advance and convincing Kyiv by leveraging arms supply and intelligence sharing. His inability to bring peace reveals the limits of power that the President of the United States has to enact the platform that he was democratically elected on.
These limits are due to a contest inside the U.S. — one that will likely shape future global security more than any other internal power struggle in any country. This includes shaping the U.S.’s responses to India’s rise. It is the contest between the America-First or anti-interventionist camp, and those represented by what Mr. Trump himself rose to power deriding — the ‘permanent Washington’.
From 2024 on
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump promised that he would end the Ukraine war ‘on my first day in office’ and ‘before I even enter office’. This was striking. Campaign promises are usually undertakings known to be popular, and Western mainstream media had spent two years stigmatising any call for peace with Russia, delineating it as a fringe opinion. But Mr. Trump knew what was rarely revealed — that the American public agreed. Even in early 2024, 66% of Americans supported a negotiated end to the war, even if it involved compromises with Russia, as a Quincy Institute survey found.
This reflected a growing and widely held position among the American population that the U.S. should curtail its worldwide military adventures and reallocate resources domestically. Six of the last eight U.S. presidential elections were won by a candidate who wanted a less interventionist foreign policy than their opponent.
This anti-interventionist position is sanguine about other great powers such as India, China and Russia maintaining hegemony in their respective regions while the U.S. prioritises its own hemisphere.
The Trump approach versus factors
Anti-interventionism is central to Mr. Trump’s ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA) movement and one that is espoused by true-believers such as U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance and Indian-American Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Mr. Trump’s election victory was a popular endorsement of peace, particularly given that it was the only aspect of foreign policy where there was a meaningful, overt difference with that of the (former) U.S. President, Joe Biden.
Despite this crystal-clear mandate, and the straightforward path to peace given Russia’s unambiguous, long-standing demands, Mr. Trump’s approach since his election has vacillated. When it comes to optics and public narrative, he has made some strides in line with his pledges. He undermined both the deification of Ukraine (dressing down Mr. Zelenskyy at the White House) and the demonisation of Russia (Alaska Summit). In doing so, he has helped re-normalise U.S. diplomacy with its rivals, harking back to a more pragmatic time.
Mr. Trump’s concrete policy actions toward peace, however, are a fraction of that promised. At most, he briefly halted weapon shipments to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine. But this was outweighed by continuing to bankroll Kyiv’s defence, as well as escalations such as the secondary sanctions on India for purchasing Russian oil. Recently, Mr. Trump humoured the backers of the non-starter proposal for a ‘post-war security guarantee’ for Ukraine.
The reason for this dithering is a contest, an ongoing negotiation, a back and forth between Mr. Trump and his movement, and those who have largely dominated U.S. foreign policy since the death of President John F. Kennedy. The latter, proximately outlined by Eisenhower, consists of a coalition of commercial and ideological interests intersecting in their preference, primarily for continuous military action and spending, and secondarily for U.S. global hegemony. It is represented by ‘permanent Washington’: ‘neo-con’ politicians whom it funds, and ideological civil servants, including those the Republican establishment foisted on Trump’s administration. Often the contest plays out internally within individuals, sometimes inside Mr. Trump himself.
A clash
The Alaska summit is a case in point. The two forces within U.S. foreign policy clashed, sculpting a compromised result. Mr. Trump got his desired optics, a red carpet for Mr. Putin evoking grand Cold War-era summits, positioning the U.S. President as a peacemaker-statesman and staying true to his promise to the American people. Without granting concessions to Russia, however, it ensured the war would carry on and a continuation of ‘permanent Washington’s’ interests being served.
The Ukraine war is the closest the world has ever come to a global nuclear conflagration. The path away from the abyss is not by complex international negotiations. There are complex domestic power struggles inside the U.S. The final resolution will be determined not by America versus Russia, but by America versus Washington. So too will many of the geo-strategic contests in the decades ahead.
Kadira Pethiyagoda is an author, adviser and geopolitical strategist. He tweets on @KPethiyagoda
Published – September 01, 2025 12:08 am IST