Trump’s Negotiating Objectives With Putin, vs. Putin’s with Trump

13 August 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The excellent geostrategic news site South Front headlined on August 12th “MONEY TALKS: WHAT PUTIN CAN EXCHANGE FOR PEACE”, and opened:

The anticipated negotiations between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are expected to follow a distinctly transactional pattern, reflecting Trump’s long-established foreign policy style. Unlike the previous U.S. leaders, who often frame international relations in ideological terms, like democracy promotion, human rights, or liberal world order, Trump’s approach is openly driven by economic interests. Analysis from the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, prepared for the Kremlin’s administration and Foreign Ministry, concluded that 90% of Trump’s foreign policy decisions are motivated by U.S. corporate and financial gains.

It went on to say,

Potential bargaining chips include access to Russia’s rare earth minerals, essential for American technology and defense industries, as well as stable supplies of uranium and titanium. Another possible area of cooperation could involve joint investment in post-conflict reconstruction in eastern Ukraine, allowing U.S. firms to participate in resource extraction and infrastructure projects. Washington may seek a role in managing the restored Nord Stream gas pipelines, enabling it to exert greater energy influence over Europe.

Ultimately, the success of these talks will depend on whether Russia can offer deals that meet Trump’s threshold for engagement, estimated at between $50–75 billion in potential gains. If so, his administration may adopt a more flexible position on Ukraine, prioritizing economic benefits over geopolitical rivalry.

If this is indeed what Putin is expecting from Trump, then Putin would nonetheless be very unlikely to sacrifice his nation’s geostrategic security in order to satisfy the objectives of America’s billionaires. Indeed, if he were to do so, many if not most Russians would despise him for doing it.

Putin knows that the reason why the U.S. Government has remained hostile toward Russia even after the USSR in 1991 ended its communism, and ended the Soviet Union itself, and ended its 1955 mirror military alliance the Warsaw Pact which had been created by the Soviets in 1955 as a response to America’s having created in 1949 its anti-Soviet NATO military alliance, has always been that those few American hyper-wealthy individuals actually control the U.S. Government and are determined to ultimately conquer Russia and add it as the biggest of all of their colonies (the others being mainly NATO, Japan, and South Korea), after which, China would come next.

For Putin to agree to any such economic proposal from Trump would therefore be treason, and many — if not most — Russians would consider it to be treason. So, Putin would have to be a fool to do that.

Indeed, the only sensible reason for Putin to agree to meet with Trump on this occasion (in Alaska on Friday August 15th) would be for him to get the American President to end the anti-Russian American empire, as Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991 had ended the anti-American Soviet empire. That would be for the world to have no empire, for the first time during the past 4,375 years.

For Russia, the proximal reason for this Trump-Putin summit is actually to end America’s war against Russia in the battlefields of Ukraine, which war U.S. President Barack Obama had started with his February 2014 Ukraine coup that switched Ukraine’s Government from being committedly neutral (even committed to that by Ukraine’s 16 July 1990 basic law and declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, swearing to NEVER join ANY “military bloc”), to becoming instead the exact opposite — the beach-head for the U.S. empire’s goal of ultimately placing a nuclear missile in Ukraine a mere 300 miles or five minutes of missile-flying-time away from blitz-decapitating Russia’s central command in the Kremlin.

So, for Putin, the objective is to get Trump to publicly admit that, as Hungary’s Viktor Orban recently said, “The Ukrainians have lost the war. Russia has won this war.”

On March 6th, I headlined, and documented my explanation of, “Why America, the EU, and Ukraine, Should Lose to Russia in Ukraine’s War”.

It is my country, the United States, that threatens world peace, and now is the time when Putin needs to tell Trump, in private, that if Trump won’t publicly admit to the whole world that this is so, then Russia will simply conquer Ukraine, and there will then be, for the U.S. empire, nothing but humiliation from this war — NO settlement, no Agreement, but ONLY what the U.S. and its colonies have shamefully, but well, EARNED from it: their DEFEAT. Trump can’t honestly (as he does dishonestly) continue to blame this war ONLY on Biden, because Obama started it, and Trump and Biden both continued it; and, so, now, the only way that Trump can honorably exit from it would be for him to openly blame Obama for having started it. Because that would be the ONLY way that this war can be ended by an Agreement between the two sides: America and Russia.

The U.S. empire is in the process of ending, but HOW it will finally end has not yet been determined. If there is to be no agreement in Alaska on Friday, the long U.S. war to conquer and absorb Russia into its empire could soon end in a world-destroying WW3.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.