Perhaps since I was busy during all the Alaska events, I find myself surprised a bit at the depth of negativity across a fairly wide spectrum of political and media coverage. I mean, the way this was slapped together was a pretty good indicator that it was unlikely to produce an immediate (or any tangible) result.
But it does speak to the Trump Admin incompetence. It is one thing to disdain the complex language of international diplomacy with its stage craft and conceding strange honorifics to brutal enemies and ceaseless between the lines speculation. It IS maddening.
But it is another thing entirely to pretend the language doesn’t even exist or is for weaker men and to nonetheless insist on rushing into a diplomatic ball and stampede into what is usually a highly choreographed waltz without knowing the dance steps or understanding the music.
Trump is often the quintessential Ugly American tourist blustering through a foreign land without understanding its language or culture, with a child’s admiration of the pomp and circumstance without considering what all that communicates.
Putin famously is fluent in English but refuses to speak it publicly or even in closed sessions except when doing so creates some advantage. Likewise, he is fluent in international diplomacy and all the things communicated by the manner of reception, who speaks when, where you meet and for how long, the minutiae that can communicate volumes. Trump is an accomplished purveyor of his personal brand of stripped down populist vernacular, which is in no small part a rejection of cautious, poll-tested rhetoric and the far more complex diplomatic speak. But he seems not just disdainful of diplomatic communication and its many dialects and the heft of its visual cues, but ignorant to them.
When Witkoff accepted the Order of Lenin medal on behalf of a CIA agent for the death of her mentally unstable son fighting for Russia, he apparently didn’t even understand the obviously intended insult. When Trump’s team invites Putin to Alaska, they ignore the value to Putin of amplifying his propaganda flex about taking back Alaska which is not serious but is intended to underline his contention that Russia is a great power deserving of restoring its Soviet and Czarist borders. When they has US military *literally roll out the red carpet for Putin, they provide images that undermine the international view of Putin the war criminal. And so on.
I guess the highly negative response is that this short theater emphasizes how incompetent Trump and his team are on the international stage, how stunted and ineffectual his MAGA vernacular really is for complex tasks, and notwithstanding leading the most powerful nation in the world, how overmatched he and his fawning team are by the sophisticated, multilingual Putin.
I mean, I thought we already knew that. But I guess seeing it play out in real time has a sobering effect.