Adults Are Back: Trump’s Alaska Summit with Putin Could Finally End the War in Ukraine

Today’s Trump-Putin summit in Alaska marks more than just a dramatic shift in tone — it signals the long-overdue return of strategic clarity to U.S. foreign policy. For over a decade, two successive administrations—Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s—have mishandled the threat of Russian aggression, enabling Vladimir Putin’s war machine to roll deeper into Ukraine.

Now, finally, with adults back in charge, there’s hope for a decisive American-led movement toward ending this war and reasserting U.S. credibility abroad.

The Obama-Biden Legacy: How We Got Here

To understand why Ukraine’s sovereignty is hanging by a thread, we need to look back to 2012. In a moment that would age terribly, then-President Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney’s warning that Russia was America’s greatest geopolitical foe. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” Obama quipped.

Less than two years later, Russia invaded Crimea.

Instead of confronting this aggression with meaningful action, Obama’s administration offered vague warnings and limp sanctions. In 2014, as Russian-backed separatists launched a bloody insurgency in Eastern Ukraine, Obama continued to posture without purpose. His team flat-out refused to send lethal aid to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Putin, sensing no real consequences, escalated further.

Sanctions alone—Obama’s go-to move—didn’t stop Russia then, and they haven’t since. As I wrote in 2014, “[Putin] interprets these actions as a further sign of weakness from the West... inaction offers the pretext to consolidate his power”.

And yet, rather than learning from this, Joe Biden doubled down on the same failed approach.

Biden’s “Feckless” Continuation

Biden entered office in 2021, claiming he’d restore U.S. leadership and rebuild alliances. But in Russia, his approach proved just as toothless. When Putin massed troops on Ukraine’s border in 2021 and later launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, the Biden administration again relied on sanctions and arms shipments with no overarching strategy. Worse, reports now suggest that Biden himself blamed Obama for “f---ing it up” in the first place.

It’s an astonishing admission. Yet Biden’s record reveals no real break from Obama’s legacy. According to a 2023 Foreign Policy analysis, “[Obama] failed to grasp the threat posed by Putin’s regime... and the assumptions he baked into the U.S. posture toward Russia have lingered long after his presidency ended”.

Biden’s military aid to Ukraine has been reactive, not strategic. His administration has waffled on red lines, hesitated on delivering advanced weaponry, and failed to articulate what “victory” in Ukraine would look like.

The result? Ukraine is stuck in a grinding, attritional war. Russia continues to hold Crimea and large swaths of eastern Ukraine. And despite billions in U.S. support, there’s no end in sight.

The Trump Reset: A Hard Line and a Clear Goal

Enter Donald Trump. Unlike his predecessors, Trump has never suffered from illusions about Vladimir Putin. While the media obsessed over optics, Trump understood the game Putin was playing—and he understood leverage.

His first term showed that strength, unpredictability, and clarity go much further than hollow press releases. Under Trump, Russia didn’t take an inch of Ukrainian territory. Why? Because they believed he would hit back.

The Alaska summit is not about appeasement. It’s about drawing a line.

Trump is meeting with Putin not to “negotiate peace at any cost,” but to make clear that the cost of continuing this war—for Russia—will soon outweigh any imagined benefit. With Europe increasingly fractured, and with American voters growing weary of endless aid without victory, Trump is uniquely positioned to shift the board.

And crucially, his approach recognizes what Obama and Biden refused to see: the most effective way to prevent aggression is to deter it early. That was the lesson of Korea, as my 2014 op-ed argued. In Korea, the U.S. presence deterred conflict and preserved sovereignty. In Ukraine, the U.S. dithered, and what I predicted came to pass... Putin interpreted the Obama/Biden dithering as weakness, and he exploited it.

A Pattern of Mistakes Since 2014

Obama’s failure to enforce consequences in Crimea in 2014 opened the door for everything that followed. Bob Woodward wrote in "War" that Biden now privately blamed Obama for this failure—allegedly saying, “We f---ed it up.” The quote isn’t just a bombshell; it’s an indictment of two decades of Democratic foreign policy missteps.

During the Obama years, U.S. propaganda efforts to counter Russia’s narrative were laughably weak. In 2015, John Schindler, writing for The Observer, reported that Obama’s team had no serious strategy to confront Russia’s information warfare machine. “The Kremlin understood the importance of psychological operations and narrative shaping... the Obama administration did not”.

And in the years following, this blindness metastasized. As the Lt. Gen. Keith Kellog, USA (Ret.) and Fred Fleitz, a former senior national security appoitee, wrote for the America First Policy Institute, “While Russia was building a hybrid war playbook in Ukraine, the Obama-Biden State Department was stuck in a Cold War-era mindset, too afraid of escalation to take decisive action”.

Ukraine's Position Is Now Weaker Than It Had to Be

Here’s the harsh truth: because of Obama’s weakness and Biden’s dithering, Ukraine is in a far worse position than it should be. It’s not just about the territory lost since 2022—it’s also about the parts of Ukraine that were already under de facto Russian control since 2014.

In other words, the window to prevent Russia’s advance has closed. Now, Trump’s task is not just to stop further escalation but to negotiate from a position of strength to recover what can be recovered—and to freeze the conflict on American terms, not Putin’s.

This would not be possible if Obama or Biden were still in charge. Their approach was paralyzed by fear—fear of provoking Putin, fear of escalation, fear of using American strength.

Trump, by contrast, understands that the greatest provocation is weakness. As he’s long said, peace comes through strength.

The End of “Strategic Patience”

The Alaska summit is the beginning of the end for “strategic patience”—a euphemism for doing nothing while others do everything. Trump’s approach is refreshingly clear: stop the war by making it impossible for Russia to win it.

This isn’t about dragging America into another endless war. On the contrary, it’s about ending one by using leverage, strength, and clarity. The same way Reagan ended the Cold War: not by fighting Soviet tanks in Berlin, but by outmaneuvering and outlasting them.

The Biden administration has spent years dodging the hard questions: What does a post-war Ukraine look like? How do we secure Eastern Europe from further Russian aggression? And what, exactly, is America willing to do to prevent another Crimea-style annexation?

Trump is now asking—and answering—those questions, questions that only exist because of the ineptitude of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

What Comes Next

Three key outcomes could emerge from today’s summit:

1. A ceasefire and roadmap to peace – Not a surrender, but a freeze, potentially modeled after the Korean armistice, that halts further Russian expansion and starts the process of rebuilding Ukraine.

2. A redrawing of red lines – Clear, enforceable deterrents against any further Russian action—not the squishy "don’t cross this line… or else sanctions" messages of the past.

3. A revitalized U.S. foreign policy – one grounded not in bureaucratic delay, but in hard-nosed diplomacy backed by a credible threat of action.

Of course, none of this will sit well with the foreign policy elite that backed Obama and Biden’s disastrous decisions. They prefer process over results, and “consensus” over clarity. But as Russia expert John Schindler put it in his Substack, Top Secret Umbra: “the deep state and its foreign policy machine have been wrong again and again, always choosing inertia over initiative.”

Today, that inertia ends.

It Didn’t Have to Be This Way

Ukraine didn’t have to lose Crimea. It didn’t have to fight tooth and nail in the Donbas. And it didn’t have to become the testing ground for a new kind of hybrid war.

But it did—because Barack Obama dismissed the threat, and Joe Biden failed to reverse course. Their weakness set the stage for war.

Now, Donald Trump has the chance to end it.

Not with more blank checks. Not with hollow speeches. But with clarity, leverage, and a message Vladimir Putin can finally take seriously: The adults are back in charge.

And America means business.