Friday’s summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin came together with all the finesse that we’ve come to expect from the US president and his administration.

The pomp kicked off with Putin, a man who orders the bombing of Ukrainian cities every night, stepping onto a red carpet at an Alaskan air base that largely exists to keep an eye on his country.

Donald Trump greets Vladimir Putin after the Russian leader lands in Alaska.Credit: AP

Historically, teams from the White House spend weeks or months putting these kinds of meetings together. There are extensive security checks, detailed agendas and countless negotiations about the optics and curation to ensure that no one gets the upper hand. When I worked at the White House, I was part of the team that planned the 2023 meeting between US president Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, which took months of detailed work.

Yet this summit came about over the course of a couple of days. After Trump announced a unilateral ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia, Putin shelled Kyiv to demonstrate how little the words of a foreign leader mean to him. I was in Kyiv that night, watching the drones and missiles strike civilian apartments – a brutal reminder of the........

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