From Anchorage to Anarchy: A Diplomatic Catastrophe in Hindsight

How a Failed Summit Green-Lit Putin’s War on the West

Last month, a Russian glide bomb killed 24 elderly Ukrainians as they gathered to collect their pensions in the village of Yarova. This atrocity was not an isolated act of brutality—it was part of a widening campaign of aggression, seeded in a catastrophic failure of American statecraft: the 2025 Alaska summit.

At the time, many of us recognized the summit for what it was—a reckless display of amateur diplomacy, the inevitable result of a foreign policy driven by impulse and spectacle. But hindsight has clarified what instinct already knew: it was worse than a blunder. It was a signal. A green light. A moment when the United States, standing on its own soil, treated the sovereignty of a free nation as a bargaining chip and handed Vladimir Putin the legitimacy of a bilateral summit—while excluding our European allies from a conversation about their own continent’s security.

We understood, even then, the moral and strategic cost of that decision. What we see now, in the grim harvest of consequences, is that Putin understood it too. The Anchorage summit was not a negotiation—it was a permission slip. It told the world that an inexperienced American administration, intoxicated by theatrics and unmoored from principle, lacked the resolve to defend its interests or its allies.

The consequences came swiftly. Emboldened by a propaganda victory secured without a single concession, Putin launched a calculated campaign to test the West’s fractured resolve. The escalation in Ukraine has been brutal. On September 7, Russia fired over 800 drones at Ukrainian cities in a single night—the largest drone attack of the war. These strikes, sustained by Chinese components and munitions from Iran and North Korea, are the bitter fruits of Anchorage.

But the aggression didn’t stop at Ukraine’s borders. On September 9, over 20 Russian drones violated Polish airspace. Days later, another crossed into Romania. On September 19, three MiG-31s conducted a 12-minute incursion into Estonia’s airspace—an act described as “unprecedentedly brazen.” These provocations have been paired with GPS jamming, sabotage of undersea cables, and AI-driven disinformation campaigns targeting elections from Moldova to the United Kingdom. This is not random chaos. It is the calculated consequence of a summit that signaled weakness.

The administration’s panicked pivot—from appeasement in Anchorage to rhetoric at the United Nations General Assembly—has only deepened the damage. Such radical inconsistency makes deterrence nearly impossible. An adversary cannot be deterred by threats it believes are performative, nor can allies rely on security guarantees from a partner whose positions shift with the political winds. Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy is no longer theoretical—it is urgent, born of necessity and the proven unreliability of its primary security partner.

The Alaska summit was not merely a lapse in judgment. It was geopolitical malpractice. While not the sole cause of today’s instability, it was a direct and foreseeable accelerant—one that emboldened an aggressive Russia, fractured the transatlantic alliance, and undermined the credibility of American leadership.

We now inhabit a world shaped, in part, by that summit: more chaotic, more dangerous, and more uncertain. The path back to stability begins not with slogans or staged confrontations, but with a return to the foundational principles of American leadership. Our strength must flow not from hollow photo-ops, but from the enduring power of our alliances, the consistency of our commitments, and the moral clarity of our convictions.

History will not remember Anchorage as a moment of diplomacy. It will remember it as a warning. The question now is whether we heed it.