The president's half-baked Alaska summit

Donald Trump, the world’s greatest negotiator according to himself, may not think he needs much advice before his summit meeting in Alaska with Vladimir Putin today. But Mr Trump should give Robert Kraft a call.

- Bret Stephens

Mr Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, knows what it's like to be fleeced by the Russian president. On a visit to Russia in 2005 with US business leaders, Mr Kraft, at the urging of Citigroup's then-chair, Sandy Weill, showed Mr Putin one of his US$25,000 (808,200 baht) Super Bowl rings.

“And he put it on and he goes, ‘I can kill someone with this ring,” Mr Kraft recounted in 2013. “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out” Mr Kraft said he was urged by the Bush administration to pretend the ring had been a gift, while Mr Putin mocked Mr Kraft’s complaint and suggested the ring was cheap.

Petty crooks sometimes become big-time ones, and Mr Putin’s career is a case in point — from reports of pilfering high-tech secrets from the West as a KGB agent in East Germany to suspicions about corrupt contracts while a mayoral deputy in St Petersburg in the 1990s, orchestrating electoral theft in Russia and electoral meddling abroad, plundering the Russian economy and seizing territory from Georgia and now Ukraine.

This is not grand strategy at work. It's grand larceny. It’s the essence of what Mr Putin is about — and surely helps explain Mr Trump's long-held admiration for him.