Yalta became a byword for betrayal. Will Trump, Xi and Putin enact another carve-up?
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has expressed concern over a potential Yalta 2.0 moment as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin prepare for a trilateral meeting on the sidelines of the Apec summit in China next week.
Many excluded from the summit in Shenzhen, principally Ukraine but also eastern Europe and Baltic countries, Taiwan and even Iran, have reason to be nervous that their sponsors might abandon them in a complex geopolitical trade-off that Putin envisions, and Trump seems to endorse.
Historical Parallels
Putin has long proposed this re-enactment of the greatest wartime summit, held in February 1945 at Joseph Stalin's insistence in a rundown Tsarist resort on the south coast of Crimea alongside Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
The original Yalta is widely remembered, outside Russia, as a moment of cynical trade-offs, even ignominy, to rival the appeasement of the 1938 Munich agreement. It was eight days that shaped the postwar world in which absent countries were discarded or divided by the imminent wartime victors.
The task is to create a comprehensive system of comprehensive security in Europe that will become a new modern Yalta or Potsdam. If we manage to create such a security system then we will ensure peace in Europe for decades, perhaps even centuries. That is our main task.
Geopolitical Calculations
Trump has cast himself in the role of the enthusiastic guest while Xi acts the bashful host, ever reluctant to embrace the status of a traditional global superpower. No one quite knows what will happen if the three men meet or even if China will allow more than a stiff protocol-driven exchange of statements.
China is already trying to push nuclear disarmament off the agenda. It may prove to be little more than abbreviated geopolitical theatre that Putin can retail domestically to show that Russia – even with an economy seven times smaller than that of the EU – still plays with the big boys.
The summit could mark 'the start of a return from this slide into absolute chaos to stabilisation'.
Stakes for Ukraine
For Zelenskyy, the concern is that almost any time Putin and Trump converse, it is Kyiv that suffers. If Putin has his way he will try to ensure that this becomes the first of a series of meetings in which the big powers organise a new world order on a set of security oriented principles in which liberal values play little part.
FDR, months from death, was intent on enlisting Russian support for a new League of Nations organisation and for Russian participation in the war against Japan. In return, he accepted the fait accompli of Russia's presence in Poland, and covered his treacherous tracks by persuading Stalin to sign a declaration that affirmed the principles of 'sovereign rights and self-government' should prevail in countries freed from Nazi rule.
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