Why are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meeting in Alaska and not at the White House or one of his swanky golf courses? Wouldn’t Trump, who is all about optics, prefer to meet Putin on familiar turf, surrounded with his trappings of power and wealth to intimidate the Russian tyrant and perhaps make him more amenable to negotiation?
Alas, Trump rolls out his intimidation tactic only against opponents he perceives to be weak:
President Trump is actually quite a bad negotiator. To understand the president’s negotiation style, ignore his ghost-written “Art of The Deal” and take a look at a book called “Winning Through Intimidation.” Though it’s largely forgotten now, it was a bestseller when originally published back in 1973.
The book — written by a real estate broker — has a simple message. There are two kinds of people in the business world: the people who get screwed over and the people who do the screwing. The No.1 reason people get taken advantage of is that they get intimidated by the other side.
So, if you want good deals, you should be intimidating. And the best way to do that, according to this book, is by cultivating an intimidating image, being aggressive and taking extreme negotiating positions.
If you had to sum up Trump’s negotiating style in one sentence, this would be it.
The irony is that the book also cautions against being intimidated by other negotiators, a lesson Trump hasn’t learned. Trump is regularly intimidated by those he perceives as more wealthy or more powerful. How else do you explain his public deference to Elon Musk or his fawning over Vladimir Putin? [Chris Truax, “Why Trump’s Strategy of Negotiation Through Intimidation Is a Losing One,” The Hill, 2025.02.28]
Trump is doing Putin a favor by offering him one of the shortest possible flights from Moscow to American soil. Moscow to Anchorage is 7,000 kilometers (a bit over 8 hours at the cruising speed of Putin’s Ilyushin-96). Washington, DC, is over 7,800 kilometers from Moscow (another hour in the air) and Maralago in Palm Beach, Florida, is over 9,100 kilometers from Moscow (nearly 11 hours. Trump could host Putin at his Bedford, New Jersey, golf course, but that flight from Moscow would still be 200+ kilometers longer than the Anchorage jaunt.
The only closer location for a Trump/Putin summit on U.S. soil would be Bangor, Maine, which would save Putin about 100 kilometers and maybe 8 minutes… but flying directly to Bangor, or Bedford, or DC, or Florida, or almost anywhere else in America besides Alaska would put Putin in European and Canadian airspace. Like the United States back when we stood up to dictators and naked aggression, European Union and Canada have banned Russian flights over their airspace. Even though those nations may except diplomatic flights, Canada and most European nations are parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest for kidnapping thousands of Ukrainian children (so, like Epstein, but worse). Trump, like Putin, scoffs at the International Criminal Court, and some ICC signatories have let another subject of an ICC arrest warrant, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, cross their airspace, but if Putin’s plane had trouble (what? Russian planes unreliable?) and had to make an emergency landing before it reached safe harbor in Trumpistan, ICC-respecting countries would have the legal right to detain Putin:
[Australian international law professor and UN special rapporteur Ben] Saul cited the Tokyo Convention of 1963, an international treaty that addresses offences and certain other acts committed on board aircraft, as another legal framework that is relevant in the interpretation of ICC states’ obligations to arrest Netanyahu.
“Under the Tokyo Convention 1963, a state normally should not interfere in an aircraft in flight to exercise its criminal jurisdiction,” he told MEE.
But there are exceptions for this provision under the same treaty, including where “the exercise of jurisdiction is necessary to ensure the observance of any obligation of such state under a multilateral international agreement”.
“So the Rome Statute would be one such agreement, allowing a state to require an aircraft overflying its territory to land, in order to arrest a person on board,” Saul argued.
Saul explained that the Tokyo Convention does not require the exercise of such jurisdiction, but permits it: “It is the Rome Statute which requires the arrest, and the Tokyo Convention then enables it to happen” [Sondos Asem, “Was It Legal for France, Italy and Greece to Let Netanyahu Fly over Their Airspace?” Middle East Eye, 2025.07.08].
To avoid the possibility of crossing territory where an emergency landing could result in an ICC arrest, Putin the human-trafficking tyrant can fly directly, without crossing the airspace of any other country, to only two American states: Alaska and Hawaii. Moscow to Honolulu is 11,300 kilometers (13+ hours), and Putin’s Ilyushin Il-96 jet would be running on fumes if it got that far, so Putin would have to stop over at the Russian bomber base at Tiksi, on the Arctic coast, to refuel. Alaska thus is the nearest practical American location where Putin can meet Trump without risk of an ICC intervention. To accommodate Putin, Trump himself makes a 5,400-kilometer/3,400-mile flight, adding extra hours in the air and away from golf to his day.
In short, by offering Putin a summit in Alaska, Trump is going out of his way to help a child-trafficker avoid justice.
A better headline might be: Convicted felon and war criminal to meet in Alaska.