I long ago stopped treating these grand summits and photo-op meetings as solutions to anything. Not recently, not since Trump, but long before his encore in the White House. These gatherings have never solved a thing. If anything, they leave more wreckage in their wake than they clear, and I’m not even pointing at the Trump–Putin circus here.
Look at Yalta. World War II wasn’t even properly finished when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin sat down to carve up the globe like butchers dividing a carcass. They could afford to do so only because the outcome was already written: Germany had been broken, gutted, and silenced. It had no seat at the table because it no longer had a voice—just the mute exhaustion of total defeat. And that is how such conflicts actually end: not through negotiations, peace tables, or noble declarations, but through the sheer exhaustion of one side until it can no longer stand, let alone argue.It’s a brutal truth, but truth nonetheless. Wars don’t end in elegant compromises; they end when one side collapses into the dirt, spent beyond recovery. I’d like to believe it could be otherwise. It isn’t.