PRESIDENT BIDEN’S FIRST FOREIGN TRIP RESETS RELATIONS WITH EUROPE, NATO & RUSSIA

 

                    …Russia’s President Putin as seen by an American cartoonist

 

The foreign trip’s theme was: “democracies do better for their people than autocracies”

The summit with Russia’s Putin concluded President Biden’s European tour.  This meeting with Putin was coming after a diplomatic sprint through Britain and Brussels, where Biden met with the leaders of the Group of Seven nations, NATO and the European Union. Buoyed by the solidarity of his allies.  “They believe that I keep my commitments when I say it,” Biden said.   And then the president had to face an adversary.  It was appropriate that Biden met with the Group of Seven and NATO before meeting with Putin.  It showed that the U.S. had re-established an important relationship that President Trump had seriously soured with both Europe and NATO.

There were no great expectations for the meeting with Putin. The United States pushed for it to take place, not as a “reset” with Russia, as Biden and the Obama administration once did more than a decade ago.  But, in the words of White House press secretary Jen Psaki, to “restore predictability and stability to the U.S.-Russia relationship.” Some experts contend that even that would be a tall order given the current atmosphere between Washington and Moscow.

But the optics did matter, as Biden and Putin did not hold a joint news conference after their meeting.  Biden had said that it wasn’t going to allow Putin to promote his side of the meeting over Biden.  There was a clear contrast to when President Donald Trump stood next to Putin in the Finnish capital of Helsinki in 2018 and Trump appeared to take Putin’s side over the assessments of the U.S. intelligence community on Russian interference in U.S. elections.  

Biden has instead famously called Putin a “killer” and he once mused that Putin had no soul. The U.S. president wanted to come away from the meeting having scored a few points, rather than having found common ground.

“A central theme of his presidency is that democracies do a better job for their people than autocracies, and Putin is among the world’s leading challengers to that idea. “Biden is also intent on showing that the United States has moved on from the Trump era’s tolerance of authoritarians, and this was a pivotal moment for that effort.”

But U.S. Republicans are already finding fault with Biden’s outreach. The sheer fact of the leaders’ encounter gives Putin a level of prestige of a bilateral meeting of equals. “Democrats complained that President Trump wasn’t tough on Russia, while ignoring the facts” of his administration’s broader hawkish posture toward the Kremlin, wrote former secretary of state Mike Pompeo in a Fox op-ed. “If Biden apologizes for America or casts pie-in-the-sky visions for cooperation, Putin will sense weakness, and America’s Russia policy will be in for a long three and a half years.”

But we all know that Biden would never apologize for America.  If anything, Biden should have accused Putin again of being a “killer” and to stop the messing with the cyber attacks.

In fact, in his first months in office, Biden has already leveled new sanctions on Putin’s regime for a range of alleged actions, including the cyber hacking of U.S. agencies and the poisoning of prominent (and now imprisoned) Russian dissenter, Alexei Navalny.  At the same time, Biden has checked with his colleagues in the State Department and Democratic lawmakers who want the administration to take an even more aggressive approach to Moscow.  He has overruled his State Department lieutenants when they opted to withhold sanctions on the company behind the construction of the Nord Stream 2 oil pipeline between Russia and Germany.

Many Democrats, still seething over the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election, wanted Biden to exert maximum pressure on Russia. Republicans, who privately grimaced at Trump’s ridiculous glowing overtures to Putin.

In a briefing with reporters ahead of the Putin meeting, Biden said he would convey to Putin where the United States’ “red lines” are, possibly around issues of election interference, cybersecurity, military escalation with Ukraine and the treatment of Russian dissidents. “I’m going to make clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate, if he chooses,” Biden said. “And if he chooses not to cooperate and acts in a way that he has in the past, relative to cybersecurity and some other activities, then we will respond.”

Putin, however, presented his own “red lines”. These included, as Moscow’s  Dmitri Trenin detailed, the prospect of Ukraine’s entry into NATO or U.S. deployments to Ukraine, as well as Western interference in Belarus. Whose long-standing ruler, President Alexander Lukashenko, has brutally cracked down on an opposition protest movement after claiming victory in an allegedly rigged election last year.

Russian state media has cast Putin as confident in the buildup to the summit where he has little to lose or to gain. “From the Kremlin’s perspective, Russia’s international status does not rest on the fact of holding periodic one-on-one meetings with an American president.  However, it’s rather on the ability to reliably deter U.S. military power and on being resilient to mounting U.S. economic, financial, and political pressure in the form of various restrictions,” wrote Trenin.

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Hal Brands describes Putin’s “raiding strategy” as the Russian president’s “bid to make Moscow enough of a persistent threat to U.S. interests that Washington ultimately feels compelled to bless Russia’s sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, legitimize its influence in the Middle East, and make other concessions to reach accommodation.”

Brands continued: “When Washington signals that it needs predictability in the relationship, it tempts Putin to show how easily he can deny that predictability until it meets Moscow’s terms.”

Other experts argue that Putin, too, may need U.S. predictability. “An increasingly out-of-touch autocrat presiding over a worsening economy, Putin cannot afford an uncontrolled intensification of international conflicts — especially with the United States,” wrote Michael Kimmage in Foreign Affairs. “Putin needs levers to manage conflict. A working relationship with Biden would cost him nothing, and it might well purchase him the geopolitical respite he needs to address the fraying tapestry of domestic Russian politics.”

I find it interesting that the only thing that Russia has over other countries is that the U.S. and Russia are the only nations that have enough atomic war heads to blow up each other and the world.  Russia’s actual economy is only the size of some U.S. states.  The only things that they have to sell other nations is their oil and military equipment and weapons, that is the basis of their economy.  They also have a long mutual border with their declared enemy, China, which is working to become the largest economic and nuclear nation on the planet.

The summit meeting with the U.S. was much more beneficial to Russia than to the U.S.  It gave Russia the kind of attention as a major power that could only come from meeting with the President of the United States.

Because of all the positive attention that the former U.S. president gave to the president of Russia, it was important for the new U.S. president to meet with Putin and make it clear that President Biden is not like the former U.S. president.

Copyright G. Ater  2021