Faced with the Kremlin’s master, American diplomacy looks like a ‘drunken ship’. The Anchorage summit was a tragicomic illustration of this. Donald Trump, who boasted that he could end the war in 24 hours with disconcerting naivety, fell into the trap set by Vladimir Putin. The latter, a cold-blooded strategist and adept at the ‘salami technique’ of cutting his prey into pieces, knew how to exploit the vanity and short-term vision of his American counterpart. The report by Laure Mandeville, special correspondent for Le Figaro in Anchorage, is one of the best analyses available illustrating this ‘diplomacy of humiliation’. To better understand the Kremlin strategist’s objective, read Laure Mandeville’s article and refer to Françoise Thom’s analysis in Le Monde,[2] which completes the picture.
