Arne O. Holm says Putin Meeting Trump in the Arctic Has a Purely Practical, Not Political, Reasoning
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. (Photo: Hilde Bye)
At the time of writing, the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska is only hours away. The meeting takes place in the American Arctic for purely practical, not political reasons. The symbolism, however, is heavy.
This is a comment written by a member of the editorial staff. The comment expresses the writer's opinions.
Today will mark the fourth visit to Alaska by Donald Trump during his presidency.
That could signify a certain interest for the American-Arctic population had it not been for the three previous visits being mere layovers from Asia on the way to Washington to fuel Air Force One.
Layover
A necessary virtue, that is, not due to curiosity or care.
Similar to today's meeting with Putin, Trump's layovers took place at the Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. The chance of meeting the civilian population within the strictly guarded military camp was zero.
Nor was that the intent.
Not because of curiosity or care.
And perhaps that is just as well. Because only a few weeks have passed since the state's republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, felt tricked by Donald Trump.
Since then, the otherwise eloquent and independent senator has crawled like a wounded animal between journalists looking for remorse.
The reason is Trump's gigantic tax cuts for the wealthiest, disguised as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. For the poor and sick, for Americans most actually, perhaps the Most Ugly Bill of all time.
Feeling tricked
The Trump Administration fought tooth and nail to have the proposal passed in the Senate. Every Republican vote counted, and finally, the entire vote could be pending on the strongly criticized Lisa Murkowski. This led to a logrolling for the ages.
Several critical senators were invited to pile on their own desires and demands in exchange for voting for the proposal.
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In the end, Lisa Murkowski voted for the proposal after winning a decisive push for wind and solar power in a state desperately in need of more energy. This secured a majority for the tax package. Murkowski swallowed her pride.
The alternative was for another 'opposition politician,' the senator from Kentucky, to be showered with promises in exchange for voting for the proposal.
In retrospect, Murkowski feels cheated, according to several American news outlets. And with good reason.
Vulnerable Alaska
Because just after the proposal was passed, Donald Trump removed the support for solar and wind power. As is known, he does not like that kind of thing. What was left was a gigantic transfer of funds from those who have the least to those who have the most. This especially impacts the most vulnerable part of Alaska's population.
In return, they will be visited by the Russian President Vladimir Putin. And this will take place at a military base that played a key role in the fight between East and West during the Cold War.
The senators feels cheated by Trump.
Vladimir Putin is the first Russian/Soviet president to visit Alaska after Russia sold the state to the US for USD 7,2 million in 1867.
A paradoxical point is that Russia and the US have a historical tradition of exchanging land, given that Donald Trump, even before the talks with Putin, has more or less clearly announced that Ukraine must cede land to Russia in exchange for "peace."
International incompetence
Back in 2017, the then and current Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergey Lavrov, was absent from a ministerial meeting in the Arctic Council in Fairbanks, Alaska, but still signed the declaration.
At that time, Russia and Ukraine were also high on the international agenda, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
By skipping the meeting in Fairbanks, this was after Donald Trump had been elected president for the first time, but before the West understood the seriousness of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Russia wanted to avoid a possible political confrontation.
A corner of NATO where Lenin presides.
This time, Lavrov is participating, adding weight to Russia's cynical competence in the meeting with an American president who has long since demonstrated his international incompetence.
But why are Trump and Putin choosing to meet in Alaska? In the Arctic?
The speculations and analyses have been many, fired up by a likely increasing interest in the tense security policy situation in the North.
More are looking northward
For me, who has worked in and with Arctic security policy for many years, the growing attention is palpable.
There were not many international journalists present at the meeting in Fairbanks more than eight years ago.
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That is not the case anymore. A few recent examples follow.
A couple of days ago, the acknowledged British journal The Economist ran a lengthy report from the Russian mining town of Barentsburg on Svalbard. The title of the report was telling enough: "A Corner of NATO Where Lenin Presides."
Illustrated with images of a Lenin statue, street signs in Cyrillic and Russian flags, the Russian mining town is described as a geopolitical headache.
John Bolton, former national security adviser in the first Trump administration, also published an op-ed in the same magazine after he visited Svalbard earlier this year. His entry into the geopolitical narrative is that “the far north has become NATO’s soft underbelly."
None of these more or less recent and random examples contain anything new, but they are part of an ever-increasing interest in and speculation about the Arctic.
But while previous reports more or less revolved around an impending rat race for valuable resources, such as oil and minerals, the current ones are more and more about security and geopolitics.
Why Alaska?
Therefore, Alaska would be a natural setting for a possibly fateful, at least to Ukraine, meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump?
I think the explanation is much simpler.
Having the meeting in Europe is impossible as long as the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an arrest warrant for Putin. The United States is not a member of the ICC.
The airspace over Canada and most of Europe is closed to Russian aircraft. Only the Bering Strait separates Russia and Alaska, which thus remains the only real alternative to a new meeting between the two in Moscow.
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Having the meeting in a heavily guarded military base also avoids any unwanted attention, such as protests or demonstrations.
What's worse, Donald Trump has also placed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky outside the military fortress. While Putin is invited into the American warmth, as Russian attacks on Ukraine intensify day by day, the victims of war are kept out.
That doesn't make the Arctic any less exceptional or "hot".
But it's also not a signal of a peaceful future in the north.
To the extent that it is a signal, it's a signal of an increasingly passive and helpless Europe in the face of Donald Trump.
