New: The Alaska Summit Planned to Take Place on JBER

On Wednesday morning, reports surfaced that the Trump and Putin teams have settled on a location for Friday's Alaska Summit between the two leaders: Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, known as JBER. It's a logical choice for several reasons, primarily due to security concerns, but also because it's tourist season here in the Great Land and most area hotels have been booked for months.

So, JBER it is, for a meeting that may well make history.

American officials scrambling this weekend to identify and lock down a venue for Friday’s summit between President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart quickly discovered a major snag: summertime is peak tourist season in Alaska, and options both available and equipped to host the two world leaders were severely limited.
When word reached certain prominent Alaskans that Trump and Putin were coming, a few began reaching out to the president’s allies with a proposition: could their home be an option? It’s unclear if those offers ever reached White House officials, who were calling sites in Juneau, the state capital, along with Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Organizers of the summit soon came to believe the only city in the massive state with viable options for the summit would be Anchorage. And only Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, on the northern edge of the city, would meet the security requirements for the historic meeting, though the White House had hoped to avoid the optics of hosting the Russian leader and his entourage on a US military installation.
That is where the two men will meet Friday, two White House officials said.

Called it.

JBER, we should note, allows Air Force One to land directly on the air base, along with President Putin's aircraft. Security will be provided by not only the Secret Service but also, presumably Army and Air Force security personnel. It's near Anchorage but not in Anchorage.

Preparations for the sit-down are already underway, including some discussions between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

The two countries’ top diplomats — Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov — spoke Tuesday to discuss “certain aspects of preparation,” according to Russia’s foreign ministry.
Usually, a high-stakes summit with a US adversary would be preceded by extensive negotiations over the agenda and outcomes. But Trump himself has said he is approaching the meeting as a “feel-out” session, with few advance expectations for how it will proceed. The White House on Tuesday termed it a “listening session.”
“The president feels like, ‘look, I’ve got to look at this guy across the table. I need to see him face to face. I need to hear him one-on-one. I need to make an assessment by looking at him,’” Rubio said in a morning radio interview Tuesday with Sid Rosenberg, offering one explanation for why Trump’s five known phone calls with Putin this year wouldn’t suffice in determining the Russian leader’s intentions.

That's a fair point; there's just no substitute, in any substantive discussion, for looking the other party in the eye.

And, there won't be any propaganda victory for Tsar Vladimir I as a result of his being driven through Anchorage and all of Mayor LaFrance's homeless enclaves.

Fail: Anchorage Streets Littered With Homeless As Trump-Putin Summit Nears

Consider also the diplomatic aspects of all this. Vladimir Putin apparently realized this meeting was important enough for him to come to United States territory, to our largest state, which up until 1867 was known as "Russian America." Not only that, he has apparently agreed, or at least his staff has agreed, to meet not only on U.S. soil but on a U.S. military base. That's a rather huge concession for the old KGB apparatchik Putin. It may be the only concession he makes, but it hands President Trump some advantage.

At first glance, it doesn't seem likely that too much will come from this, at least as far as Ukraine is concerned; we presume there will be other topics on the table, but Ukraine is sure to be the primary point of the summit. On Wednesday, hours before this summit was to take place, Russia launched a major offensive and smashed through the Ukrainian front lines, which is sure to have elicited some sharp comments from President Trump; it's a certainty he'll have something to say about it when he and President Putin sit down to talk. Also, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky, as of this writing, won't be in attendance, and any peace deal will have to be made between him and Tsar Vladimir I.

There's a long, long way to go yet on this deal. But this may be a start.

Editor's Note: The Trump administration is exposing Barack Obama and his administration's Russian Collusion Hoax.

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