Washington Dispatches Witkoff to Berlin for 14–15 Dec Ukraine Peace Summit

Major-power peace brokering in Europe has echoes of the 1995 Dayton Accords, when U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke corralled Balkan leaders at an Ohio air base and traded territorial maps under deadline pressure. Three decades later, America again tries to translate battlefield stalemate into a settlement, but the balance of power has shifted: Europe now demands legally binding U.S. security guarantees before conceding an inch, signalling its lingering dependence on Washington even as it speaks of "strategic autonomy." If a deal emerges it could crystallise a long-term partition similar to the 1954 Geneva lines in Vietnam—temporary on paper, entrenched in reality. Conversely, failure would prolong a war that is draining Western arsenals and accelerating the multipolar re-armament cycle. On a 100-year horizon, whether this summit succeeds matters less for today’s personalities than for the precedent it sets: can great-power diplomacy still redraw borders without formal multilateral institutions like the UN at the center, or are we inching back toward ad-hoc congresses reminiscent of Vienna 1815 where territory was bartered by the victors?