Trump’s Summit With Putin Need Not Be an Echo of Appeasement

Ideas

By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, John Herbst, Robert Hormats and Steven Tian

August 16, 2025 11:54 AM EDT

Sonnenfeld is the Lester Crown Professor of Leadership Practice and President of the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management—the world’s first school for incumbent CEOs as well as nation’s first mayors’ college and first summit programs for college and university presidents. Sonnenfeld’s expertise is in top leadership and governance. He has advised five US president across political parties. He led research teams that catalyzed the historic exit of 1200 companies from Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

Herbst is a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and Uzbekistan and Senior Director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He served for 31 years as a foreign service officer in the U.S. State Department. He worked to enhance U.S.-Ukrainian relations and helped ensure the conduct of a fair Ukrainian presidential election and prevent violence during the Ukrainian revolution.

Hormats, former U.S. Undersecretary of State, has been a senior official in the administration of five American presidents across political parties. He also served as Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs International and Vice Chair of Kissinger Associates, and is now a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University. He was a top-level envoy with Henry Kissinger during the shuttle diplomacy in the Mideast with frequent negotiations with Syria’s Assad regime.

Tian is research director of the Yale Chief Executive and a former analyst for Rockefeller Capital Management. He previously worked in the office of the State Department’s undersecretary for Iranian nuclear nonproliferation.

President Donald Trump’s unprecedented summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska has failed to deliver the breakthrough on securing a ceasefire in Ukraine that he was hoping for. But Trump proved to be more cautious than many diplomats thought, moving in consultation with European allies and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—and the failure of the Alaska Summit need not be an unvarnished disaster nor an echo of Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 appeasement at Munich.

What comes next matters far more than the predictable failure to make a breakthrough, and now Trump needs to make the war more costly to Putin financially and militarily. It’s time to call Putin’s bluff.

As Trump himself declared before the meeting, if Putin did not agree to stop his war on Ukraine, there must be “severe consequences,” and the time has come for Trump to tighten the screwsby increasing economic pressure on Putin and by buttressing military assistance for Ukraine. As Admiral James Savridis, Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, complained: “Putin strung Trump along again with diplomatic rope-a-dope and there should be military consequences for Putin.”

It would be a tragic mistake if this turned into merely another instance when Trump threatens Putin with tough talk, only to back down prematurely. Clearly, Putin is counting on Trump backing down and falling victim to his smoke and mirrors. But that bark-and-no-bite approach would destroy U.S. credibility as much as it would erode Trump’s own credibility. Trump’s initial reaction, declaring on Fox News that it would be up to President Zelenskyy to push the ball forward, is exactly the opposite of what should be done. The truth is that even now, Trump holds all the leverage while Putin has none.

Despite Putin’s braggadocio, claiming a win from the legitimacy of visiting U.S. soil for the first-time in a decade, despite having an ICC arrest warrant to his name after the killing of tens of thousands of civilians and the kidnapping of 20,000 children; still, Trump averted the worst-case scenario of falling for Putin’s propaganda, stopping hours of planned follow-up meetings that Putin had planned with Russian business and economic development officials. Trump has been correct in recognizing that none of the 1,200 companies whose exit from Russia we helped accelerate have ever expressed interest in returning to Russia.

The fact that Putin even thought that the U.S. needs the Russian economy shows how deluded Putin still is. Putin’s only commodities are easily interchangeable raw materials that he brings to the world market; no finished goods, industrial products, pharmaceutical ingredients, fashion or financial products come from Russia at scale. Like a mercantile colony, all Putin has is a lot of land, raw materials, and psychopathic propaganda.

The reality is that despite Putin’s tough guy bluster, Putin is a failure economically and militarily, and Putin’s house of cards is far more vulnerable than many realize. In fact, after three years of grueling warfare, Putin’s economy is in tatters as Putin stares down bankruptcy.

As we revealed previously, for years now, Putin has been obfuscating how weak the Russian economy really is by hiding and fudging the numbers. Putin refuses to disclose major economic indicators as required by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This ranges from foreign trade data, monthly output data on oil and gas, and central bank monetary base data.

Due to Putin’s obfuscation, few appreciate how close Russia is to running out of cash. The value of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and foreign exchange reserves has dwindled by half since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, as he draws down his windfall oil revenues faster than he can replenish his coffers. That is because Putin is running an unsustainable record budget deficit to fund his war machine in the tens of billions. And with over 1,000 multinational businesses having exited from Russia, the Kremlin is running out of new cookie jars to raid to keep the lights on.

The time has come for Trump to escalate economic sanctions and economic pressure on Russia by cutting off Putin’s exports of oil and other natural resources, once and for all. By tightening the screws on Putin’s already crumbling economic house of cards, Putin could run out of money very soon—perhaps even by the end of the year. Already, Trump has threatened secondary tariffs on India for buying Russian oil, which aligns with the bipartisan legislation put forward by many of his GOP allies in the Senate, including the “Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025” legislation co-sponsored by Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Richard Blumenthal, which would impose secondary tariffs and sanctions on countries which continue to fund Russia’s war machine.

Simultaneously, Trump has to fortify military assistance for Ukraine, with our European allies being forced to shoulder an increasing share of the burden as previously-appropriated U.S. support dwindles. Already, there is growing momentum in Congress, including from Trump’s GOP allies, for another major military aid package to help Ukraine, despite the misguided cries of outnumbered, outgunned isolationists such as JD Vance not to support Ukraine anymore. Already, there is a bipartisan proposal in the Senate for a new $54.6 billion package in new aid to Ukraine, which would make it the largest aid package for Ukraine yet.

Providing Ukraine with desperately needed military aid is the best way to show Putin who really holds the leverage. In particular, replenishing Ukraine’s stock of F-16s and Patriot missile interceptors would be an incredibly powerful and effective boost.

That military aid is sorely needed. As Ambassador Michael McFaul pointed out on MSNBC, “since President Trump has been in the White House, the war has gotten more aggressive. There’s been more attacks on Ukrainian civilians, the number of drone and missile attacks have gone up”.

After trying and failing to secure a ceasefire from Putin, the time has come for Trump to impose the “severe consequences” against Putin that he has previously threatened. If he fails to do so, then Trump’s inaction, after Putin’s blatant unwillingness to agree to a ceasefire and other measures to end the war on constructive terms, will be deserving of the comparisons to Chamberlain’s Munich summit with Hitler—and go down as a far greater blunder than Joe Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan."

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