High stakes diplomacy and canceled Halibut Olympia, insights from the Alaska Summit

0:00Welcome to Finland, President Trump. I'm reading from a sign that is plastered across the front windows of Finlayson Department Store. I'm Mary Louise Kelly in Geneva. About 100 yards away is Villa La Grange. This is this grand 18th century villa. It is the site of the Biden-Putin summit, which is coming up in two days' time. My co-host Mary Louise Kelly has seen her share of political tete-a-tetes around the world. But what did she think of the recent summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska? This is not my first rodeo as summits go, and I've never seen anything like it.

0:41It was kind of shocking, even for a foreign policy veteran like Mary Louise. From the location, hosting Putin on U.S. soil after years of allegations of war crimes, to the organization or lack thereof. Mary Louise says it was all a far cry from the kind of planning that has gone into summits she has attended before. And all of that planning ahead, it happens for a really good reason. Because they're not just planning whose plane lands first and how do we keep it secure and what's the motorcade arrangement. They're trying to figure out if things go terribly wrong, where's the nearest hospital? How do we get there?

1:15They're doing contingency for contingency for contingency plans. So all of that did not happen the way it usually happens. She says things at this summit came together so hastily that many people she talked to in Anchorage weren't even aware that the city was the site of such a high-stakes meeting. There's one other incident that gives some insight into just how quickly and chaotically all of this was organized. Guests at an upscale hotel near the summit location found confidential government documents on a public printer there. NPR broke that story, which detailed some of the sensitive information contained in the documents, including, among other things, the lunch menu for the two world leaders.

1:53It featured halibut Olympia, served with whipped potatoes, as I recall. And it's notable, partly, that documents were left on a hotel business center printer, but also that the lunch never happened because Trump and Putin ended up coming out, taking no questions, and then taking off. Consider this. Normally, foreign policy summits between world leaders involve painstaking planning and organization days, weeks, even months in advance. The hectic and last-minute nature of last week's meeting between Trump and Putin gives us a window into how much of what's happening to try and end a brutal war in Ukraine is being made up on the fly.

2:40From NPR, I'm Scott Detra.

2:51It's Consider This from NPR. All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly has covered her share of high-stakes diplomatic meetings between some of the world's most powerful people. So for our latest reporter's notebook, I wanted to talk to her about what she noticed in Anchorage during President Trump's last-minute summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I started by asking Mary Louise how much the amount of planning really matters when it comes to these kinds of meetings and what the lack of organization here could indicate about what is or isn't being agreed to behind the scenes. To be clear, it matters not one whit whether the press corps that was descending on Anchorage was inconvenienced.

3:31I mean, who cares? But it does. It illuminates a little bit the hastiness with which this summit was slung together compared to the weeks of advance planning and, you know, back channel talks that are usually going on between, in this case, the Russian and American teams. You know, the diplomats involved, the National Security Council staff meetings that would be involved. So I remember sitting the morning of the summit as we're waiting to get underway. They have packed all of the reporters coming in to the Joint Army Air Force Base, Elmendorf Richardson, where this was happening on the outskirts of Anchorage, and thinking, this is disorganized compared to other summits that I have covered.

4:15And I very much hope that the substance of these talks, the policy that's at stake here, has been more thoughtfully crafted. And, of course, we've got a little bit of a glimpse into that as the day unfolded. You covered President Biden and President Putin in 2021. You also covered the infamous or famous, depending on how you want to put it, summit between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, which was one of the memorable moments of that first Trump administration. What to you was different this time around of the body language, of the statements, of the way, at least what we saw playing out in public, the interactions between Putin and his top staffers and Trump and his top staffers this time around?

4:56There was a lot that was different. I mean, we nodded to that the setting was very different. Those last two, the Biden summit with Putin was in a chateau on the shores of Le Clément of Lake Geneva in the Alps. The Helsinki summit was in the presidential palace in a beautiful ballroom. So there was kind of nowhere to go but down in terms of the setting. That's no shade to the lovely joint base, Elmendorf-Richardson, which also has some lovely mountains. Not everything can be Geneva. There was no reclet in sight. But, you know, among the reasons that this summit was not in Europe is that Putin is now persona non grata in much of Europe because he has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court linked to the war that he started in Ukraine, which was why we were all ending up in Alaska for this summit.

5:46So that whole setting and the optics, you're just thinking about what has transpired since the last time that an American president sat down with a Russian president. And then, you know, more seriously even is the way that this Alaska summit flipped the script on its head. Usually, as I say, you would have had all of the advance work, a lot of details being laid out. And you need the presidents to come and push the ball over the line. And in this case, Trump, as with many things, likes to flip things around. He wanted the big show, the big literally rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin before a lot of the details had been sorted.

6:26So we've now had two summits, the Putin summit and then on Monday at the White House with President Zelensky of Ukraine and other European leaders. And now the staffers are desperately trying to sort out what's the breakthrough, what's the detail, what next? I want to ask you a few questions about how you approach these assignments as a reporter and as one of the hosts of All Things Considered, because the news value is unquestionable. Some of the most powerful people in the world are getting together face to face to solve big problems or try to solve big problems. But the thing about this is, and I've covered some of these events as a reporter as well, you and I and all the other reporters are very far away from where the action is taking place.

7:06And a lot of the key moments are taking place behind closed doors. So what are you thinking about ahead of time of the types of reporting that you're going to do, how you were going to add the value of your expertise in a situation like that, where unfortunately you are not being asked to sit down at the table with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump? No, although I'm available the next time if they want to have us in the room. I just always circle back as a reporter to the value of being there. It is better to be somewhere and be able to see and hear and sense firsthand what is happening. There are details you just can't get if you're not there about the optics.

7:43You're picking up on who's sitting next to who, who seems to have whose ear, how are they arranging it, who's coming in first, how long was that pause? Those are things that are hard to see. and glimpse and feel. You're also getting the sense of, I'm looking at logistics that has nothing to do with the substance, but what does that tell us about how quickly this was pulled together and whether all the I's were dotted and the T's were crossed before they got these two presidents of Russia and the United States in a room. I've seen that traveling all over the world in less than perfect situations.

8:16When you go and report from North Korea, when you go and report from Iran. Perfect isn't on the menu, but it's a whole lot better than not going and only having the version that the regime that the state in control would like you to see in the images and tape that they are releasing. You'll always glimpse little things. I remember being in Iran for all things considered a few years back at the height of the protests after the death of Masa Amini in police custody. And we weren't allowed to go everywhere we wanted to go. We We weren't allowed to go interview prisoners. A lot of people were scared to speak to us.

8:54But we sat there one night and heard people opening their windows and calling through the night air in Tehran. And you couldn't see them, but they were calling margbar dictator, death to the dictator, death to Khamenei, freedom. And it was the absolute last thing that the government that was hosting us would have wanted us to hear and report. And we would have missed it had we not gotten on that plane. And I think about that moment often when I'm trying to figure out, is it going to be worth it? Do we get on the plane? Yeah, I think the answer is you get on the plane. Are there one or two examples of anything you saw or experienced at this last assignment, big or small, that kind of informed the story to you in a way that I watching on a video feed in Washington, D.C., would not have seen, would not have been able to pick up?

9:40Just the body language of seeing, for example, Trump's envoy, Steve Witkoff, a man who is now charged with the diplomacy on Ukraine and Russia. He's also handling diplomacy on the Middle East. This is a man who had no diplomatic experience until this year, but who Trump trusts and likes. And he came in the room, didn't look happy, and then immediately turned around and left. And then the other people, the head of both delegations, start filtering into the room. And you're reading the body language and reading what people look like. And the presidents themselves, you know, Trump, as you know well, as a former White House correspondent, Scott, Trump likes to take questions.

10:23He's constantly posting on social media. So when he came out, let Putin speak first, took no questions, didn't even try to shape this as a win. It was telling. Yeah. This is a type of story that you've been drawn to over the years. And I'm wondering what it is about about statecraft, about summits, about kind of the people who run countries getting together in a room to try and figure out problems. What is it that draws you that makes you think this is the particular type of story that I can really make my own that I want to lean into and hit the road for? Through my career as I have covered diplomacy, intelligence, national security, they're all of the big abstract themes.

11:07They're all of the staffers trying to figure out which little detail can we put in place? If we give on this, what are we going to have to let them take on that? But it's always fascinated me as a student of history. Sometimes it does just come down to getting a couple of people at the right moment in a room. And that can change the world. The power of one, two, few people to change the world and the trajectory of a country. Start a war. Into war. How fascinating is that? And to have the chance to glimpse that, even from well outside the room. but to watch how that might come together and that moment where you think wow, like there might be a breakthrough here we have a chance that's fascinating to document it's fascinating to watch and it's fascinating to try to explain that in real time here's where we are, here's what we see here's what we're hearing here are the questions that we don't know the answers to but we're pushing for them to share that with our audience how great is that?

12:07I would pay you to let me do that That was All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly This episode was produced by Kira Joachim. It was edited by Sarah Robbins and Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

12:26It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.