A summit between the American president and Vladimir Putin is described as a listening session aimed at discerning how the war in Ukraine might end, with talk of a broader, potentially consequential meeting that could save lives. There are whispers of a bargain in which Russia might gain access to Alaska’s rare earths and some sanctions on its aviation sector could be lifted, possibly enabling purchases of Boeing jets using frozen state assets. Such arrangements, if they accompany a ceasefire, would be pitched as a settlement acceptable to both sides. After the talks, the president would brief Ukraine’s leader and European allies and seek a Putin–Zelensky dialogue, with the possibility of the American president joining. The president’s trust in Putin remains guarded; threats of sanctions remain as leverage if commitments are not kept. Separately, the possibility of tariffs on countries doing business with Russia is floated if no ceasefire materializes, starting with India and potentially extending to China. Analysts are cautiously optimistic but treat the outcome as a step toward an endgame rather than the end itself. One analyst cautions that the Alaska talks could mark the beginning of a negotiated end, but not a decisive turning point.

What we are witnessing is not merely diplomacy but the psychology of power attempting to steer the unknown into a palatable form. The lure of a single bargain—resource access, lifted sanctions, and a route to arms purchases—reads like a shortcut around the stubborn, decentralized processes by which peace is ordinarily created. Yet peace cannot be conjured by trading pieces of sovereignty on the altar of expediency. It rests on predictable rules, credible commitments, and the unforced efficacy of voluntary exchange, not on the ability of rulers to bargain away assets or to suspend the consequences of coercion behind a veneer of “mutual interest.” If the price of ending a war is to militarize economics—to reward aggression with access to strategic resources or to threaten countries with tariffs—the moral hazard is not merely fiscal but constitutional. It is a reorientation of the state’s role from guardian of a predictable framework for voluntary cooperation to arbitrator of winners and losers in a global resource scramble.

There is a deeper temptation here: to believe that complex human conflict can be reduced to a handful of grand bargains between leaders, that the intricate knowledge of millions—enterprise, innovation, relationships, culture—can be aligned through executive fiat or a clever swap of assets. In truth, the most enduring peace emerges from a society organized around the rule of law, competitive markets, and the freedom to pursue mutually beneficial exchanges without coercion. When sanctions, tariffs, and resource concessions become the currency of concord, the risk is not only mispricing international relations but corrupting the very incentives that make peaceful cooperation possible in the long run. The instinct to secure a quick ceasefire through a high-stakes deal may be understandable, but it should not delude us into thinking we can outwit the complex, local, dispersed knowledge that governs prosperity and the limits of political power.

If there is a hopeful thread, it lies in the recognition that dialogue is better than isolation and that peaceful settlement is preferable to perpetual conflict. But genuine settlement will not be secured by the illusion that the state can perfectly calculate outcomes or by tying the fate of vast resources to the whims of national policy. It will be earned only when the institutions that enable voluntary exchange—property rights, contract, rule of law—become the visible framework within which trust grows, risks are priced, and the diverse interests of peoples are reconciled through peaceful competition. Until then, we would do well to distrust the economy-as-arm of policy and to favor the disciplined humility of markets and the liberty that makes them flourish.