Published on, Aug. 18 -- August 18, 2025 6:04 AM

Thus, on Friday, Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will hold an Alaskan summit over Ukraine. The last US summit held in Anchorage, Alaska, was between US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi in March 2021. It turned into a public spectacle with both sides firing off angry charges and counter-charges. Will this summit be more productive?

One way to anticipate the possible outcomes is through considering a series of binary choices. Either one or both sides will leave the conference having achieved nothing much, as Trump was unable to persuade North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jung Un to denuclearise in June 2018 in Singapore, or there will be an agreem...