Let’s cast our memories back to Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 15. Trump was criticized by many for excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy from that conclave. Usually that means nothing, but lo and behold, this was one time when Trump clearly felt he needed to respond to the criticism, because he had Zelenskiy and other European leaders to the White House the following Monday. Unlike the Anchorage tête-à-tête, the failure of which even Fox News couldn’t avoid noting, the Zelenskiy meeting was all smiles. Trump said at the time that the United States would give Ukraine “very good protection, very good security.”

There were references in the American media to the supposedly cunning three-dimensional chess game Trump was playing; in the right-wing media, there was copious bleating about the inevitability of Trump’s Nobel Prize. Trump also said that day that Putin had agreed to accept security guarantees. Trump envoy Steve Witkoff went even further, asserting that Russia had agreed to “Article 5-like protections”—a reference to the NATO charter, implying that Putin had privately signed off on the idea of Ukraine being part of a Western defense pact.

What’s happened since? Putin went off to meet with China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi in a strongman summit that was obviously designed to announce to the world: We are uniting against Trump, and we are not afraid of him. Modi is furious........

© New Republic