Washington: US President Donald Trump estimated Thursday that there was a one in four chance of his summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday ending in failure.
“This meeting sets up the second meeting, but there is a 25 percent chance that this meeting will not be a successful meeting,” Trump told Fox News Radio.
Trump turns history on head with Putin invitation to key US base
Donald Trump is turning history on its head with his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin — inviting Russia’s leader to land that once belonged to Moscow, and meeting him at a military base that monitored the Soviet Union.
The location is all the more striking as Putin is under indictment by the International Criminal Court, with Friday’s summit marking the first time he has been allowed in a Western country since he invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The two leaders will meet at Elmendorf Air Force Base, which goes by the motto “Top Cover for North America.”
Trump has said that Putin suggested the summit and it is unclear to what extent the Republican president thought through the symbolism of the base or Alaska, still yearned for by some Russian nationalists.
But George Beebe, the former director of Russia analysis at the CIA, said the Alaska setting showed an emphasis on what unites the two powers — history and the Pacific Ocean — rather than on rivalry or the conflict in Ukraine.
“What he’s doing here is he’s saying, ‘This is not the Cold War. We’re not replaying the series of Cold War summits that took place in neutral states’,” said Beebe, now director of grand strategy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which supports military restraint.
“We’re entering a new era, not just in the bilateral relationship between Russia and the United States, but also in the role that this relationship plays in the world,” he said.
Russia had settled Alaska from the 18th century but, struggling to make its colony profitable and crippled by the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II sold it to the United States in 1867.
Then secretary of state William Seward was ridiculed for the purchase, dubbed “Seward’s Folly” due to the perceived lack of value of Alaska, but the territory later proved to be strategically crucial.
The United States rushed to build what became Elmendorf Air Base after imperial Japan seized some of the Aleutian islands following their 1941 surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
Then with the Cold War, Elmendorf became a key center to observe Soviet movements across the Bering Strait.
As recently as nine months ago, an electronic surveillance plane from Elmendorf as well as other US planes scrambled to track Russian planes flying off Alaska’s coast.