The order to US troops to kneel on the runway of an American airbase in Anchorage, Alaska, to roll out a red carpet for Vladimir Putin set the tone for the summit that would follow. President Donald Trump – who went to the summit insisting on a ceasefire in Ukraine – bowed to his Russian counterpart, and now says that the best way to end the war is to “go directly to” a peace agreement.

The University of Toronto’s Timothy Snyder sees the summit as the “arctic endpoint” of Trump’s “fantasy world,” in which foreign leaders are swayed by “fantastic promises and obnoxious bullying.” While “tough talk” may work on Americans, it will do nothing to convince Putin to abandon his vision for Ukraine – a “puppet government,” a “population cowed by violence,” and “resources in Russian hands” – especially when Trump offers “extraordinary concessions to Russia in exchange for nothing at all.”

In fact, writes former German foreign minister and vice chancellor Joschka Fischer, by inviting Putin – an “indicted war criminal” – to meet on US soil, Trump ended his diplomatic isolation and effectively endorsed the Kremlin’s vision of a restored Russian empire “reclaiming its lost territories.” Trump thus sent clear messages to Ukraine (“You belong where you belong”) and Europe (“The idea of ‘the West’ no longer means much, if anything, to America”). Neither can count on the United States.

Now, as The New School’s Nina L. Khrushcheva warned last year, Ukraine may be facing territorial “dismemberment,” with Trump and Putin forcing the country to cede land to Russia in the name of “peace.” But there is little reason to think that Ukrainians, who have demonstrated immense “courage and dynamism” and incurred enormous “human and economic losses” in the war, will “submit quietly to the idea of partition.” As history has “amply demonstrated,” such partitions typically lead to “devastating violence” and “long-lasting enmity.”

Carl Bildt, a former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden, highlights another lesson from history that Putin seems to have missed: the Soviet empire that he is attempting to recreate was a “massive failure,” which ended in a collapse so catastrophic that “Western countries had to fly in emergency humanitarian assistance.” Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is thus a “threat to many” – not least ordinary Russians, who are suffering and dying for it.

WARSAW – In the ancient world, people spoke of “Ultima Thule,” a mythical land in the extreme north, at the end of the earth. By venturing north to Alaska to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump reached his own Ultima Thule, the arctic endpoint of a foreign-policy dreamworld.

For Trump, foreign leaders can be dealt with like Americans, with fantastic promises and obnoxious bullying. But the fantasies do not function beyond America’s borders. The empty offer of a “beautiful” future does not move dictators who commit crimes to advance their own visions, or affect people who are defending their families from a criminal invasion stealing their land and wealth, abducting their children, and torturing and murdering civilians.

Putin has no reason to prefer Trump’s vision of a beautiful future to his own: a Ukraine with a puppet government, a population cowed by violence, patriots buried in mass graves, and resources in Russian hands.

Like Trump’s fantasizing, his bullying also does not work abroad. To be sure, many Americans are afraid of Trump. He has purged his own political party, with threats of violence helping to keep Republican members of Congress in line. He is deploying the US military as a police force, first in California and now in Washington, DC.

But foreign enemies apprehend these intimidation tactics differently. The very moves that shock Americans delight America’s foes. In Moscow, deployments of soldiers inside the United States look like weakness.

Tough talk may resonate in America, where we confuse words with action. But for Russian leaders, it covers a weak foreign policy. Trump has made extraordinary concessions to Russia in exchange for nothing at all. Russia has repaid him by continuing the war in Ukraine and mocking him on state-controlled television.

What are those concessions? Just by meeting Putin in Alaska, Trump ended more than three years of Western diplomatic isolation of the Kremlin. By shaking hands with an indicted war criminal, Trump signaled that the killings, the torture, the abductions in Ukraine do not matter.

Even the choice of Alaska was a concession, and an odd one. Russians, including major figures in state media, routinely claim Alaska for Russia. Inviting people who claim your territory inside your main military base on that territory to discuss a war of aggression they started without inviting anyone representing the country they invaded – well, that is just about as far as a foreign-policy fantasy can go. It is Ultima Thule.

It was the very end because Trump had already conceded the more fundamental issues. He does not speak of justice for Russian war criminals or of the reparations Russia owes. He grants that Russia can determine Ukraine’s and America’s foreign policy on the crucial point of NATO membership. And he accepts that Russia’s invasions should lead not only to de facto but also de jure changes in sovereign control over territory.

Accepting that invasion can legally change borders undoes the world order. Granting Russia the right to decide the other countries’ foreign policy encourages further aggression. Abandoning the obvious........

© Project Syndicate