The Alaska Summit and the Clash of Civilizational Worldviews: Why Western Diplomatic Frameworks Continue to Fail
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The Summit and Its Strategic Context
The Alaska summit of August 15, 2025, represented a critical moment in US-Russia relations following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. This meeting marked Vladimir Putin’s first visit to the United States since the invasion and served as a platform for Russia to articulate its vision for a new relationship with America while advancing its objectives in Ukraine. The Russian delegation, under Putin’s leadership, approached the summit with five clear objectives: positioning Russia as a global power equal to the United States, strengthening control over Ukrainian territory, persuading the US to delay additional sanctions, framing the conflict as a “family tragedy” rather than an invasion, and engaging Trump personally to create the appearance of progress without substantive concessions.
Russia’s negotiation tactics during the summit reflected what the article describes as “a master class of strategic positioning.” Putin employed flattery and appealed to Trump’s stated desire for deals, presenting economic opportunities like joint Arctic development to shift focus from Ukraine. The Russian leader forwarded maximalist demands including Ukrainian neutrality, recognition of seized territory, and land transfers, while expecting some proposals to be rejected but using them to create a normalization narrative in Russian media.
The Clash of Strategic Cultures
The article extensively analyzes Russia’s distinctive strategic culture, which fundamentally differs from Western diplomatic traditions. Since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, Western diplomacy has operated on principles of state sovereignty, conflict reduction through reconciliation of interests, and separation between diplomacy and espionage. Russia rejects these premises entirely, viewing sovereignty as relative and contingent upon size and power rather than as an inherent right of all states.
This divergence stems from Russia’s historical experience and civilizational perspective. Russian international relations theory regards great powers like Russia as the only truly sovereign states, with smaller nations—particularly former colonial possessions near Russia’s imperial heartland—occupying a subordinate position. This worldview has been articulated through Putin’s extensive writings and speeches, including his July 2021 editorial on Ukraine and his February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson.
Russia’s approach to negotiations reflects its distinctive view of war and peace as existing on a continuum rather than as diametrically opposed concepts. From this perspective, negotiations serve as instruments to provide tactical advantages in an ongoing competitive process that may ultimately lead to conflict. This fundamentally contrasts with the Western view of diplomacy as a means to achieve peace and stability through compromise.
The Imperial Continuum in Russian Strategic Thinking
The article traces how Russian strategic culture has evolved across imperial, Soviet, and contemporary regimes while maintaining consistent themes of encirclement by external enemies, Russian exceptionalism, and a special mission in the world. The influence of this strategic culture ebbed during the Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years, when Russia briefly embraced Western-style win-win diplomacy, leading to significant arms control agreements and cooperation.
However, the resurgence of traditional strategic culture began in Yeltsin’s final years (1996-1999), fueled by NATO enlargement, intervention in Serbia, and resentment over Russia’s lost status and the economic turmoil of the 1990s. Under Putin, Russian foreign policy has fully reverted to its traditional anti-Western orientation, blending imperial tsarist and Soviet ideas about Russian exceptionalism with post-Cold War grievances and increasing militarization.
The intelligence services—particularly the SVR, FSB, FSO, and GRU—have played a crucial role in driving this approach, merging power, nationalism, imperialism, secrecy, and business with Putin’s encouragement. These siloviki (men of force) descended from the Soviet KGB now form the regime’s institutional core, viewing themselves as defenders of Russian civilization against Western threats.
Critical Analysis: Western Myopia and Civilizational Arrogance
The fundamental failure exposed by the Alaska summit and Russia’s ongoing diplomatic approach lies not in Russian tactics but in the West’s persistent inability to recognize that civilizational states operate from entirely different epistemological and ontological frameworks. The West’s continued insistence on applying Westphalian norms to states that never participated in the Westphalian system represents a form of intellectual imperialism that doomed the Alaska summit from its inception.
Russia’s negotiation behavior, while characterized as cynical and manipulative in the article, actually represents a coherent expression of a civilizational state’s approach to international relations. The Kremlin School of Negotiation, as articulated in Igor Ryzov’s 2016 book, provides a systematic approach that reflects Russia’s historical experience and strategic culture rather than some deviation from Western “norms.”
The real tragedy is that Western policymakers and analysts continue to view Russian behavior through their own cultural and historical lens rather than making the effort to understand the civilizational context from which Russian actions emerge. This intellectual laziness—this refusal to engage with non-Western epistemologies—has cost countless Ukrainian lives and threatens to destabilize the entire international system.
Rather than condemning Russian tactics, the Global South should recognize that the Alaska summit demonstrates why non-Western nations need independent diplomatic frameworks and institutions. The BRICS organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and other emerging platforms offer alternatives to Western-dominated diplomatic structures that inherently privilege Western perspectives and interests.
The Path Forward: Embracing Multipolarity and Civilizational Diversity
The solution to the Ukraine conflict and similar geopolitical challenges lies not in forcing Russia to conform to Western diplomatic norms but in creating new frameworks that acknowledge and respect civilizational differences. The West’s continued insistence on its own superiority—intellectual, moral, and cultural—represents the greatest obstacle to genuine peace and stability.
Global South nations, particularly civilizational states like India and China, must take leadership in developing alternative conflict resolution mechanisms that don’t privilege Western perspectives. The Ukraine conflict has demonstrated the bankruptcy of Western diplomatic institutions, from NATO to the current UN security architecture, which remain trapped in post-World War II power dynamics that no longer reflect global reality.
The Alaska summit should serve as a wake-up call to the entire Global South: we cannot rely on Western-designed institutions to resolve conflicts that emerge from civilizational differences. We need new platforms that acknowledge different historical experiences, cultural frameworks, and civilizational perspectives without imposing one set of norms as universally valid.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine deserve criticism from a humanistic perspective, but the West’s response deserves equal criticism for its intellectual poverty and civilizational arrogance. Until Western policymakers recognize that their framework represents just one among many valid ways of understanding international relations, we will continue to see destructive conflicts and failed diplomacy.
The future belongs to multipolarity, civilizational diversity, and genuine respect for different ways of understanding world politics. The Alaska summit didn’t fail because of Russian manipulation; it failed because the West remains intellectually unprepared to engage with civilizational states on equal terms. The Global South must build the institutions and frameworks that the West cannot or will not create—for our own future, and for the future of international peace and stability.