Leave The Experts Behind: Trump’s Best Move For The Putin Summit

The Financial Times laments that when President Trump meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska, there will be “no experts in the room.” To many in Washington, that phrase is intended to alarm. It is meant to evoke images of a president outmatched, deprived of sage counsel, and vulnerable to manipulation. But what if the absence of these so-called experts is not a deficiency, but an advantage? What if the very people now bemoaning their exclusion are the same ones who have led the US into debacles from which it has yet to recover?

To answer this, we must examine the actual records of the experts the FT cites as indispensable. Their names are familiar: Eric Rubin, Eric Green, Fiona Hill, Daniel Fried, John Bolton. Each has held esteemed positions, written policy papers, and sat in high-level meetings. Yet each, in critical moments, has been associated with strategies and judgments that proved disastrously wrong.

Eric Rubin warns that Trump has no policymaker with Russia or Ukraine expertise advising him, pointing to low morale in the diplomatic corps and vacant posts. Yet Rubin’s own tenure offers little evidence that this expertise translates into effective deterrence. In 2014, as a Deputy Assistant Secretary in the State Department’s European bureau, he helped manage the Obama administration’s response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. That response consisted mainly of meaningless sanctions and worthless diplomatic rebukes, coupled with a refusal to provide Ukraine with defensive arms. The result was not the restoration of Crimea, but a frozen conflict that emboldened Moscow and set the stage for future aggression. Expertise, in this case, was not a bulwark against expansionism, but a cloak for timidity.

Eric Green, who cautions that Trump could be outmaneuvered by Putin without seasoned advisers, served as President Biden’s top Russia aide on the National Security Council before and during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. His team’s deterrence strategy relied on publicly releasing intelligence about Russia’s invasion plans, an approach meant to shame and deter Putin. Putin invaded anyway. The administration also refused to negotiate on NATO expansion, even symbolically, foreclosing any diplomatic off-ramp. Whether one believes that offering such an off-ramp would have worked, the fact remains that Green’s expert-led strategy failed in its own terms. Deterrence was not achieved. The war came.

Fiona Hill recalls considering faking a seizure to stop Trump’s 2018 Helsinki press conference with Putin, portraying herself as the custodian of proper statecraft. Yet her own record includes serious misjudgments. In 2004 she urged Western leaders to “stop blaming Putin and start helping him,” a recommendation that reads today as shockingly naive. More recently, she co-authored a UK defense review so alarmist that respected historians and former ambassadors condemned it as warmongering based on a false premise. If Trump’s press conference was awkward, Hill’s advocacy for gearing Britain for near-total mobilization against Russia risked far more serious consequences.

Daniel Fried argues that Trump and his adviser Steve Witkoff “don’t know enough” and need an expert in the room to challenge the president. Fried’s own career should give us pause before we anoint him as that expert. He was a key architect of NATO’s eastward expansion, a policy that critics across the spectrum argue fueled Russian paranoia and aggression. He was also part of the Bush administration’s diplomatic team in the run-up to the Iraq War, working to split Europe into “Old” and “New” camps to secure support for the invasion. That war, sold on false premises, remains one of the most damaging strategic blunders in US history. Fried later oversaw sanctions policy against Russia, which did little to halt its aggressions in Ukraine. His expertise has been consistent only in its inability to produce the promised results.

John Bolton dismisses Trump’s preparation habits, recalling that in 2018 the president watched soccer highlights instead of a nuclear briefing. Bolton is the most famous of the group, and his record is equally famous for its failures. As a top State Department official, he was a key proponent of the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, a claim that was false. The invasion of Iraq, which Bolton still defends, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, destabilized the Middle East, and strengthened Iran’s regional position. Bolton has repeatedly advocated preventive war against Iran and North Korea, often with little more than his own assertions to support him. If Trump prefers to trust his own instincts over Bolton’s counsel, that may be less a sign of recklessness than of prudence.

These case studies reveal a consistent pattern. The expert class, as represented by Rubin, Green, Hill, Fried, and Bolton, has presided over policies that failed to deter adversaries, squandered American credibility, destabilized regions, and in some cases led directly to war. They have enjoyed the prestige of their titles without paying a personal price for their mistakes. And now, they warn us that without them in the room, the US is at risk.

But perhaps the greater risk lies in continuing to entrust our national strategy to those whose track records are defined by failure. The idea that president after president should defer to career diplomats who have repeatedly failed is idiocy. Expertise is not an inherent good. It is valuable only when grounded in sound judgment, adaptability, and a willingness to learn from mistakes. In the absence of these qualities, expertise becomes a self-reinforcing credential, used to defend the status quo long after it has been discredited.

Trump’s critics say he prizes loyalty over experience. They neglect to note that the experience in question is often experience in getting things wrong. A president who seeks counsel from successful dealmakers, skilled negotiators, and those with real-world achievements outside the foreign policy bubble may actually be expanding the range of options available to him. In business, as in diplomacy, fresh perspectives can expose blind spots that insiders no longer see.

None of this is to claim that negotiation with leaders like Putin is easy, or that unconventional advisers guarantee success. But it is to insist that the burden of proof has shifted. After Iraq, after Afghanistan, after Libya, after the failure to deter Russia, those who built these policies must demonstrate why they should be trusted again. Until they do, the absence of such experts from the room is not a flaw, but a safeguard.

The FT wishes to frame the Alaska meeting as a contest in which Trump enters unarmed. The truth is that he may be leaving behind the very weapons that have misfired for decades. In their place, he brings a willingness to question orthodoxies, to test assumptions, and to pursue outcomes measured not by the approval of the foreign policy establishment, but by their benefits to the United States and its citizens.

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