U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s summit in Alaska was the two leaders’ first in-person meeting in Trump’s second term and the first time any U.S. president has met with Putin since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The ostensible goal was to make progress toward ending the war in Ukraine, but neither Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky nor his European allies were invited.
Rather than treating leaders such as Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping primarily as competitors, “what Trump wants is a world managed by strongmen who work together” to carve out spheres of influence, wrote Stacie Goddard in a recent essay for Foreign Affairs. This vision resembles “a ‘concert’ system akin to the one that shaped Europe during the nineteenth century.” But Trump’s approach may turn out poorly, warned Goddard. The Concert of Europe ended in disaster—“with a series of limited wars on the continent, then with imperial conflicts erupting overseas, and, finally, with the outbreak of World War I.”
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