The Alaska summit and the crumbling proxy war in Ukraine

The carefully staged handshake between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin on the tarmac of Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska on Aug. 15 wasn’t just a photo op. Big business media fixated on the summit’s brevity and lack of announcements – surface-level optics that obscured its real significance.

The handshake gave a clear message: the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine lies defeated.

When Trump landed in Anchorage, he said, “I want to see a ceasefire, I won’t be happy if it’s not today.” A ceasefire would give the U.S.-NATO proxy forces in Ukraine some relief, time to rearm and recover. 

For Trump, it was also one last chance to salvage his claim as “peacemaker-in-chief.” As Politico reported, Trump “urgently needed the meeting” and “urgently needed a tangible outcome” – a ceasefire.

Hollow threats: Sanctions boomeranged

Trump’s leverage going into the Alaska summit was the threat of secondary sanctions on top of the primary sanctions – penalties targeting third countries (like China, India, or others) that continued purchasing Russian oil. This was intended to cut off Russia’s oil revenue, its primary source of funding for the war.

But Trump’s threat was hollow. 

Three years of conflict, billions in weaponry, and a sanctions regime that boomeranged against U.S. interests. The push for secondary sanctions on India and China didn’t just fail; it drove New Delhi and Beijing closer to Moscow, knitting the Russia-China alliance ever tighter. 

What Russia has demanded is the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine and the removal of NATO. That’s nonnegotiable.

Trump’s demand for an “immediate ceasefire” instead morphed overnight into calls for a “comprehensive peace agreement.” The pageantry of Zelensky’s Oval Office appearance on Aug. 18 is just preparation for the ending.

The deal

The deal reached in Alaska is imperialist realism stripped bare:

• Ceasefire scrapped: Trump pivoted to an undefined peace
• Sanctions shelved: Trump assured Fox News, “no need to think about that now.”
• Proxy war buried: The summit signals the end of the U.S. promise to isolate Russia — a project that drenched Ukraine in blood but never toppled Moscow.

What emerged from Alaska was not peace. Ukraine becomes the pawn sacrificed so that Washington can reposition for a larger target: China.

Elbridge Colby, Trump’s Pentagon policy chief, has made clear that U.S. focus and resources must be overwhelmingly redirected towards China, not Ukraine or the proxy war against Russia. 

On Aug. 8, CNN reported that Colby had issued a memo that gave the Defense Department authorization to divert weapons and equipment intended to go to Ukraine. CNN concludes that the memo added uncertainty to “an already murky picture of the status of U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine ahead of President Donald Trump’s potential meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth paused a large package of weapons shipments to Ukraine.

Hegseth has bluntly talked of the “stark strategic realities.” Hegseth’s own words are: “The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing tradeoffs.”

Repositioning, not peace

Imperialist strategy demands trade-offs, and Ukraine, bled white after billions in weapons and staggering human cost, is no longer considered a priority.

However, any peace agreement, if it comes, would still be irreconcilable with U.S. hegemony. Any truce, therefore, will be temporary at best, breakable the moment it no longer suits Washington.

The Alaska handshake signals not an end to U.S.-NATO warfare, but its redirection. The struggle against all imperialist war, and the system that necessitates it, remains the urgent task.