What can the anti-war movement say of Donald Trump’s summit meeting in Alaska called to discuss a potential peace deal with Vladimir Putin in NATO’s lost proxy-war against Russia in Ukraine?
Firstly, that any summit meeting between leaders of the world’s largest nuclear armed powers must objectively be a good thing. The roster of urgent, outstanding issues of existential importance to the future of our shared planet extends from ending the Ukraine war, to the US and Israel’s ongoing failed attempts at regime change in Iran, to the escalation in use of intermediate range missiles since Trump pulled the US out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in August 2019.
In February 2026, the current Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty expires. Unless an extension, or replacement can be agreed and ratified the growing likelihood of global nuclear conflict will become a near certainty.
Alaska is itself a Trumpian symbol of transactional Great Power deals. Trump openly vaunts US territorial claims over the Arctic as a resource rich region of untapped oil, gas and rare minerals, as well as a strategic logistics route linking Asia and Europe.
On taking up office as 47th US President in January 2025, Trump boasted of his ambitions to annexe Greenland and Canada as future US territories.
Before his Alaska summit Trump told the media, “There’ll be some land swapping going on … for the good of Ukraine. Good stuff, not bad stuff. Also, some bad stuff for both.”
Alaska exemplifies a geopolitical land swap. The 17th US President, Andrew Johnson signed a treaty on 30 March 1867 purchasing Alaska from Czar Alexander II of Russia for $7.2 million USD.
Russia first offered to sell Alaska to the US in 1859 after defeat by Britain and France in the Crimean War. The US Civil War (1861-65) delayed the sale, but Russia calculated shrewdly that if the US gained Alaska, it would disadvantage Britain, Russia’s main imperial rival in the Pacific.
Such realpolitik calculations remain relevant today as NATO member states in Europe ramp up arms spending and recklessly talk up war with Russia.
So, the Alaska summit is also important because it ruptures the neoconservative public narrative that has dominated US imperial strategy since the 1990s and holds sway over all European NATO members and most western media. Put bluntly, Putin can be a negotiating partner, or the new Hitler, but he cannot be both.
General Sir Richard Shirreff, a former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe and go-to media war hawk, asked by BBC Radio 4’s Today Program on 13 August 2025 how to achieve peace in Ukraine, replied: “Russia’s got to get a bloody nose. Russia’s got to recognise Zelensky as president of Ukraine, recognise the Ukrainian constitution and Ukraine’s right to exist as a sovereign state. And that is only going to happen when Russia gets a really bloody nose.”[1]
Set aside, the west’s cognitive dissonance over Zelensky’s constitutionality, which has been under fire in recent weeks from his usual loyal western media backers from The Spectator to the New York Times. The bombastic malevolence of a retired British general demanding Russian blood as the price of peace in a war that has already been responsible for the deaths of millions is simply depraved.
Between 1.6 and 2.5 million members of Ukraine’s Armed Forces are estimated to have been killed in action with similar numbers of wounded since February 2022. Videos circulate of Ukrainian press gangs snatching random men off the street. On 29 July 2025, Zelensky signed an order to allow men aged over 60 to join the armed forces.
NATO generals have already destroyed Ukraine’s population for generations to come. Now they are running out of Ukrainians to use as cannon fodder, they face the difficult question of how to prepare other European populations for sacrifice to their bloodlust.
As the New York Times[2] reported in excruciating detail in March this year, NATO’s war in Ukraine has been directed at a strategic and tactical level at every stage from Clay Kaserne, US Army headquarters for Europe and Africa in Wiesbaden, Germany.
The role of senior British military and intelligence planners in this debacle has been central to the dangerous adventurism that led to Ukraine’s Kursk offensive amongst other military disasters. The NYT quotes an anonymous European intelligence chief on NATO’s role in Ukrainian armed operations, “Now they are part of the murder chain”.
Today’s summit in Alaska is taking place because the US, UK and NATO have lost their war in Ukraine. Russian armed forces and military industrial capacity proved superior to that of NATO’s planners and the bloated western arms corporations that need permanent war to justify their escalating claims over public spending.
Russia’s terms for peace have long been well known, even if Trump’s officials pretend not to understand them. Russia demands an end to NATO interference in Ukraine by western military and intelligence agencies, an end to Ukraine’s bid for NATO membership and a new security architecture in Europe and to address the ‘root causes’ of the conflict, which is the truth that dare not speak its name in western capitals, that peace in Ukraine is unsustainable without denazification.
Despite Trump’s recent attempts at misdirection, there is not the slightest chance that Putin will swap an inch of territory recognised as Russian by Russia’s constitution, including the oblasts of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk, or the Crimea with its strategic Black Sea naval bases.
If Trump’s advisors thought threats of “bone-crushing sanctions”, or more US arms for Ukraine would change Russia’s position they will be (already have been) disappointed.
As Trump’s Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth openly states, the US administration’s priority is to achieve a division of labour, where NATO members in Europe take over the continuation of conflict with Russia in Ukraine (using US arms supplies) to free US armed forces to escalate a conflict with its “peer-competitor”, China.
The pro-war chorus, which is particularly strident in the British state and media is already preparing to justify to its domestic audience the official deployment of British and other European NATO troops in Ukraine, under the guise of ‘peace keeping’, in the words of the ludicrous UK Defence Secretary, John Healey “to reassure Ukrainians”.
When asked by the BBC on the day of Trump and Putin’s Alaska summit meeting, whether British troops in Ukraine would fight Russian armed forces in the inevitable circumstances that they were attacked, Healey’sevasiveness was clear, “Well, those are hypothetical, so I’m really not going to discuss and can’t discuss at this point.”[3]
Healey told the Today Program, “The purpose of British forces as part of a much wider coalition of the willing – and we’ve had over 200 military planners from 30 nations over the last few months doing detailed planning for the point of a ceasefire and the support of multinational forces that can reinforce safe skies, safe seas and rebuild the Ukrainian forces for themselves. They are ready to go. They are ready to act from day one in a ceasefire. We are setting up the joint headquarters with the French for that. The military plans are complete.”[4]
Meanwhile, new polling shows a large majority of Ukrainian citizens want to end the war with Russia through negotiations. Gallup’s most recent poll[5] in Ukraine conducted in July 2025 reveals 69% favour a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible, compared with 24% who support continuing to fight.
As anti-war socialists argued in 1914, the main enemy is at home. John Healey is living proof of that.
[1] BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 13/08/25 (1:37) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002h036
[2] The Secret History of the War in Ukraine, The New York Times, 29 Mar 2025https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/29/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-wiesbaden.html
[3] BBC Radio 4 Today Programme, 15/08/25 (2:24) https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002h092
[4] Ibid
[5] Ukrainian Support for War Effort Collapses, AUGUST 7, 2025 https://news.gallup.com/poll/693203/ukrainian-support-war-effort-collapses.aspx