Jake Broe Is Right to Be Disgusted, But His Post-Alaska Analysis Doesn’t Quite Cut Deep Enough
- john raymond
- Aug 28
- 3 min read
Jake Broe rightly identified that the Alaska meeting between President Trump and President Putin included deeply repugnant conversations — specifically, about the re-entry of U.S. energy majors into Russia.
But Jake made the subtle analytical error of treating the leak of those discussions as the point of the summit. In reality, the Kremlin expected such leaks and used them as part of the moral inversion gambit.
The real purpose of Alaska was the moral inversion maneuver already signaled by the Trump White House: reframing Russia’s war of aggression as a stalemate, one that Ukraine and the West should yield to, while dangling “peace in our time” and Western greed as bait.
The Real Record
The Leak:
Post-Alaska reporting revealed that Trump’s team discussed ExxonMobil’s return to Sakhalin-1 and the sale of U.S. technology to Russian LNG ventures.
The leak produced immediate outrage — and as Jake argued, the conversations themselves are revolting. They embody the cynical subordination of Ukrainian lives to profit.
Jake’s Frame:
Jake took the correct stance that these discussions show Trump’s soullessness.
But he then implied that this was the purpose of Alaska, i.e. that energy profiteering was the hidden core.
The Kremlin’s Logic:
Kremlin planners are not naïve about leaks. They assume leaks happen eventually — especially in the U.S. environment.
Therefore, they design “leak-worthy” content as cover. This means the oil major angle was bait: an attention-grabbing but secondary story that pulls public disgust into a financial register.
The Inversion as the True Point:
Well before Alaska, the Trump White House was signaling the new gambit: to invert the logic of the war, recasting Ukrainian defense as “obstruction to peace.”
By placing oil profits in the conversation, Alaska feeds that inversion. The hidden subtext becomes: “If Ukraine would just concede, everyone could cash in.”
This weaponizes cynicism, making surrender appear pragmatic while hiding the Kremlin’s true objective — the destruction of Ukraine as a sovereign state.
Analysis with the Raymond Method
Pillar One (Regime Security): For Putin, Alaska was not about some highly unlikely energy contracts. It was about survival: keeping Russia’s regime secure by locking in his narrative of stalemate and moral reversal, painting Ukraine as the obstacle to peace — and now an obstacle to western prosperity.
Pillar Two (Asymmetric Warfare): The leak itself is part of an asymmetric deception. It appears to expose the “real agenda,” when in fact it distracts from the actual strategic inversion — that Ukraine should be pressured to give up fortifications and cities to “unlock peace and profits.”
Pillar Three (Byzantine Traitor-General): Trump serves as the traitor-general by laundering this inversion as negotiation. By staging greed as the hidden issue, he conceals the betrayal of Ukraine, the actual true goal of Alaska.
The Actual Implications
For Analysts: The trap here is to believe that because something leaked, it must be the central point. But in asymmetric statecraft, leaks are pre-designed weapons.
For Ukraine: Kyiv must not be pulled into the inverted frame. The real battlefield remains strategic legitimacy: securing territorial integrity under international law.
For the West: If the West swallows the narrative that “Ukraine’s resistance is blocking peace and profits,” it plays directly into Kremlin hands.
The Right Conclusion
Jake’s disgust is morally right, but analytically incomplete. The oil-majors talk was not the heart of Alaska. It was a decoy, one engineered to obscure the inversion: part of pressuring Ukraine into surrender while blaming it for Western economic losses, on top of being the obstacle to peace.
To miss this distinction is to play “regular chess.” To see the Alaska gambit as it truly is allows one to understand that the oil discussions — and subsequent leaks — were part of the moral inversion ploy from the very start.
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