American President Joe Biden’s first encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin was unpleasant. In November 2001, the new Russian president was driven to Capitol Hill after a friendly news conference at the White House with then-US president George W Bush. There, Putin met Biden, then-chairperson of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and other leading lawmakers.
Things went south quickly when some legislators tried to bring up Russia’s expanding sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Putin pounced.
“It was like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” said Michael Haltzel, who was then Biden’s Europe and Russia specialist and was in the room. “All that sweetness in the Rose Garden, and then it was just viciousness. He was nasty. His eyes were darting left and right. He looked like a cornered animal.”
Since then, Haltzel said, Biden has been skeptical of finding any real accommodation with Russia on common values like democracy and human rights. During a Kremlin visit in 2011 as vice-president, Biden said he told Putin he “doesn’t have a soul” — an arch reference to Bush’s comment, widely mocked, that he found Putin “very straightforward and trustworthy” and “was able to get a sense of his soul”.
“He’s always been a realist,” Haltzel said. “He’s never had any illusions about these people.” But how does he act now that he’s US president? Biden isn’t expected to achieve much at his initial summit with Putin in Geneva on Wednesday, but with his focus on the rise of China and his domestic agenda, his team does want to establish what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called “a more stable and more predictable relationship with Russia”.
The language echoes, more or less, what Moscow has been saying, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov remarking that “we’re absolutely interested in normalising these relations”.
That is where any agreement seems to end. Even before they sat down, the two leaders appeared to disagree about a proposal made by Putin. After Biden said Putin’s declared openness to exchange cybercriminals with the United States is “potentially a good sign of progress” on Sunday, his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said Biden had been misunderstood.
“What he was saying was that if Vladimir Putin wants to come and say, ‘I’m prepared to make sure that cybercriminals are held accountable’, Joe Biden is perfectly willing to show up and say cybercriminals would be held accountable in America because they already are,” Sullivan told reporters afterward. “This is not about exchanges or swaps or anything like that.”
What is it about? All Biden can hope to achieve in the foreseeable future is a kind of cold peace, many experts said. This would be built on mutual cooperation — for example, over managing the aftermath of Russia’s intervention in Syria, the bilateral nuclear Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, Iran’s nuclear program, and climate change — and perhaps what experts call “rough rules of the road” for curbing cyberwarfare and the ransomware attacks that have so disrupted relations.
At a new conference following his meeting with NATO leaders on Monday, Biden said he wants “to make clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate if he chooses” but only if Putin doesn’t continue to act “in a way he has in the past”. He also said he plans to “make it clear where the red lines are”.
The biggest obstacle may be that, for both sides, intransigence with the other pays off politically at home.
“Trust in Putin is falling, and the economy is stagnant. One of the ways he can try to further his support is by being seen as a co-equal with the United States on the world stage,” said Timothy Frye, a Columbia University scholar who authored a recent book on Putin called Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin’s Russia.
“Putin will try to personalise the summit and give the appearance of a mano-a-mano& struggle with Biden in order to reinforce the message that it is really Putin keeping Russia strong.”
That means Putin is also likely to lash out in some way — and continue to wink and nod at Russian ransomware hackers he regularly claims to have no knowledge of.
Biden, meanwhile, is being attacked by Republicans for waiving sanctions against the company building Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany, calling the controversial project a “done deal” and saying he wants good relations with Berlin.
In an essay in the Washington Post on Friday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member James Risch accused the administration of having “no concrete agenda for the meeting” and said Putin’s only interest is to sow “chaos”.
The Biden team also carefully organised the trip so the president would meet with NATO and Western allies first and then cruise into Geneva with the “wind at his back”, Sullivan said. Their intended message: it’s Russia versus the rest of us. (Of course, it’s not, since it was notably the European allies, chiefly Germany, that pressed Biden to concede on Nord Stream 2.)
Nor are the two leaders said to have any real chemistry — especially after Biden, asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in March if he thought Putin was a “killer”, responded, “I do”. The comment prompted a furious response from the Kremlin.
And Putin, who has long made the encroachment of NATO a justification for his own moves against Ukraine, knows Biden was an early and aggressive proponent of NATO’s eastward expansion.
When Putin was asked by NBC News in an interview that aired over the weekend about Biden’s comment that he had no soul, the Russian leader responded: “I do not remember this particular part of our conversations.” He suggested he could work with Biden and echoed US officials who have called for more “predictability and stability” in Russia’s relationship with the US. “This is something we haven’t seen in recent years,” he added, blaming Washington for the problem.
Lavrov even said, in an interview with Russia’s Rossiya Segodnya state news agency, that US-Russia relations are currently worse than they were during the Cold War because of a lack of “mutual respect”.
Lavrov’s real message seemed to be that Washington doesn’t respect Moscow enough — and if that doesn’t change, the Russians are going to continue to make trouble in places like Ukraine’s border (where Putin provoked Biden in recent weeks by deploying nearly 80,000 troops) as well as at home, where the Kremlin recently banned dissident Alexei Navalny’s political movement.
Moscow says no progress is possible if the US keeps piling on sanctions. Last month, the Biden administration added to them by imposing sanctions for interfering in the 2020 US presidential election and for involvement in the SolarWinds hack of federal agencies, both of which Moscow has denied.
Yet another provocation from Moscow emerged last week. As multilateral talks with Iran approach a critical point over its nuclear program — negotiations Moscow is ostensibly part of — the Washington Post reported Russia is preparing to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system that would enable Tehran to track regional military targets.
At a news conference on Sunday, before his NATO summit, even as he said he agreed with Putin that relations were at a low point, Biden spoke vaguely of being “ready” to develop “some strategic doctrine” to work with Russia. That may be a stretch, some experts said, especially when it comes to cyber threats.
“I don’t think there is enough trust for a meaningful formal agreement, but there can be discussions that clarify each side’s red lines,” said Harvard University’s Joseph Nye, a former senior US diplomat.
Both sides recognise the virtues of at least some stability — and Putin can ill afford more of an arms race than he already has: cyber, nuclear or otherwise. During the Cold War, despite settled certainty on both sides that they would outlast the other — analogous to the way some US experts view Putin’s shaky regime today and the Kremlin sees mainly a fractured, declining US — there was plenty of strategic accommodation, especially in arms control. That meant a degree of openness and restraint even as both sides continued to conduct major espionage and disrupt each other’s operations, similar to today’s cyberhacking.
Many experts are also worried that, with Putin developing new nuclear-powered cruise missiles and transoceanic nuclear-armed torpedoes, a new nuclear arms race has begun largely under the radar, resurrecting a scary idea that Cold War deterrence had seemed to put to rest: that fighting a nuclear war is possible.
“How many disagreements did we have with the Soviet Union, yet we concluded arms control pacts that provided insight into the most destructive weapons we have?” said Samuel Charap, a Russia expert at Rand Corp. “The idea of a cold peace is a good metaphor so as to get the relationship to a place where Russia is no longer taking highly destabilising actions.”
As a result, at the very least one “deliverable” expected out of the summit may be that both sides will restore their ambassadors to their posts.
Russia recalled its ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, from Washington shortly after the new US president took office, when Biden, in his ABC interview, said Putin “will pay a price” for his efforts to undermine the 2020 US election and delivered his “killer” comment. Moscow then booted US ambassador to Russia John Sullivan.
At the NATO summit, Biden is intent on forging an agreement on a revised NATO Strategic Concept that includes a united front against “Russia’s aggressive policies and actions” as well as challenges posed by China to “our collective security, prosperity, and values”,
Sullivan told reporters on Sunday that NATO allies are planning to extend the alliance’s Article 5 — which pledges assistance among NATO allies in case of attack — to cyberwarfare on “a case-by-case basis”. Under that new understanding, allies would provide “technical or intelligence support from another ally” if any nation is hit with “a massive cyberattack”.
The biggest advantage Biden may have going into the summit is his success at lowering expectations. By scheduling a Biden-only, follow-up news conference, the administration ensured there would be nothing like Trump’s embarrassing performance with Putin in Helsinki in 2018, when Trump said he believed the Russian leader after Putin said he was not interfering in US elections.
“This is not a contest about who can do better in front of a press conference to try to embarrass each other,” Biden told reporters over the weekend. “Now, he can say what he said the meeting was about, and I will say what I think the meeting was about.”
Michael Hirsch is a senior correspondent and deputy news editor at Foreign Policy.
Hang on there – just who is “resurrecting a scary idea” ? It is the author of this article, and he is scaremongering. The “scary idea” (of worldwide destruction) was invented in the 1950s by science fiction authors such as Neville Shute. Perpetuating the idea makes the scaremongers seem important, and provides funding by the fearful to organisations like Greenpeace.
However we have a much more dangerous threat over our heads now, with accelerating global warming. Currently, renewables can only supply on-demand power by relying on the backup of a full fossil-fired power grid. All of that fossil power must be replaced and it can only be done while the public is unafraid of it. Writers skilled at scaremongering would serve the public more by hunting down fossil emissions and the emitters who persist in the crime.
We need the public to be unafraid of nuclear energy if we are to replace all fossil energy, because renewables sure can’t do it alone.
We need everything, asap. Fossil fuel is far more dangerous than nuclear. It’s a fact – pass it on.
There, wasn’t so hard for you to finally say it out straight, was it?
Preferable to your unusual, tendentious tap dancing around the topic.
The Public, the majority of whom we rely on to produce a Democratic Society have been so dumbed down by right wing propaganda that we have no hope of achieving true Democracy.
I find this article incredibly one sided. It would be good to have an accompanying article giving the Russian side. In it, I would hope to have mentioned the following which is not an exhaustive list by any means:-
I know that I am asking a lot as our dominant mode is Russia bad, US good but the above article is ridiculous in its partisanship although what else can we expect from such sources.
I don’t expect this from Crikey.
The problem for the west is that Putin is now Russian President for Life. The only way he’ll leave the Kremlin is the same way as Lenin and Stalin, in a box. The only question that remains to be answered is if he’ll end up in that box via natural causes or via a sudden injection of lead. And all of Putin’s actions are based on his obvious desire for it to be the former.
As long as he keeps producing and there is no viable contender then he will be quite safe.
One thing you can bet on, Tony, is Putin won’t confuse Libya and Syria, like Biden did a couple of days ago – 3 times in one short ‘appearance’ (he was speculating on where he might find some opportunities to ‘cooperate’ with Putin and Russia).
The giveaway was when he spoke about Russia being ‘present’ in “Libya”, and suggesting Russia might be of assistance in getting ‘humanitarian aid’ to the people ‘trapped’ in Libya, ‘near the border with Turkey’.
You might also like to seek out the interview Putin granted to NBC. I’m not sure the full interview has been aired, as yet – NBC have been feeding tastes for a few days.
I’ve been schooled about the NBC interview already from my Russian wife.
The full “interview” is available on YT. Putin is calm and polite. The “Journo” was out of his league and rude at times.
President for life? 6 year terms with the next election due in 2024 actually Please don’t mention Navalny. He is worse than Putin if you take the time to investigate. This is about a number of major countries standing up to the USA. Nothing more, nothing less.
Navalny’s not even close to the ‘opposition leader’, Lex, and never has been. He polls somewhere b/w 2 and 4%, where the ‘Commies’ poll 15 -20%, and regularly top the polls behind the ‘United Russia Party’.
Disagree. Putin can be viewed as popular(ish) amongst mostly ageing voters due to nobbling any opposition or dissent, controlling media (disappearing the odd journalist or two), making church and military paramount, stifling academic freedoms, stacking the judiciary and shutting/harassing NGOs.
Putin and his oligarch allies have been supporting the Tories and the City of London for offshore tax shelters hiding oligarchs’ corrupt winnings, while in Europe Russian security and intelligence services have been obsessed with disrupting Germany’s democracy, and the EU which he views as an existential threat (i.e. many middle class Russians prefer living in the EU vs. Russia…).
Meanwhile had been trying to make bridge heads in Central Europe and the Balkans; now it’s only Hungary i.e. PM Orban vs. other V3 nations who have taken action against Russian diplomatic activity and/or ‘businessmen’.
Men like Putin, who have come to power as he has and maintained it as he has, don’t get to retire gracefully to enjoy their dotage and to fawn on their families. They face a bullet, if lucky, or a slow painful death, if unlucky. Unless nature rescues them first.
He ‘came to power’ when he was plucked from the St. Petersberg’s Mayor’s office by Yeltsin, in the late ’90’s, when Yeltsin began having regrets about letting Western capital loot Russia from the time the Berlin Wall came down.
During that looting, ~50% of Russians fell below the poverty line, exemplified by a collapse in life expectancy greater than any nation had suffered, outside of war time.
Come Putin, come the recovery in life expectancy, in less time than it took to collapse – also unprecedented in history.
To understand the Russian people’s regard for Putin’s leadership, you and a whole lot of like minded people should acquaint yourselves with a peer reviewed paper written by a group of American academics, a few years ago.
The group was headed by a fella named Scott Gehlbach who, at the time, was a Professor of Political Science at the Uni of Wisconsin-Maddison.
They used a particular polling technique to remove biases, such as the “social desirability bias”.
To quote ‘Politifact’, about the paper;
“After conducting four list experiments in January and March of this year, Gehlbach and his co-authors concluded that the high level of support for Putin is real. If anything, their finding of 80 percent support might be an underestimate.”
Same article;
“This study is evidence that Putin is genuinely popular in Russia, wrote Joshua Tucker, a political science professor at New York University, in a the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.
In sum, “the findings suggest both that the West will likely be dealing with a popular leader when it interacts with Putin in the days to come,” Tucker wrote…..
This past summer, Pew found 88 percent of Russians “have confidence in (Putin), to do the right thing regarding world affairs.”
Hero worship? Watching RT?
Of course all that looting has stopped under Putin no corruption nor funds going offshore via the City of London…… of course all educated middle class and youth want to stay in Russia, watching decline, as opposed to live in the appalling EU etc.
Nothing out of order there. I personally watch RT, CCTV/CGTN, AL Jazeera etc to get a counterpoint to the stories being spouted on Western Media. Always two sides to any story and it’s amazing what the Western Media doesn’t show us.
Corruption exists everywhere BTW.
Often a lot more than two sides to a story Lex. As you illustrated really in listing the several sources you view. And yes, the fact that RT, CGTN, Al Jazeera etc have their own standpoint and their own barrows to push shouldn’t distract us from the fact that BBC, CNN, DW etc have their barrows to push too.
I wouldn’t confuse counterpoint with astroturfing and/or political agitprop…… bit like Australian media.
However, to understand any area or issue etc. one must have a broad and deep understanding of the history through reading…. news media do not inform nor educated but simply ‘message’.
The late Mid East journalist and specialist Robert Fisk was a great proponent of the need for journalists to study and refer to history for understanding of the Mid East versus simply reporting what dribbles through…..
The current generation of “Journalists” are a disgrace. For example, the reporting on the HK riots for was simply “order taking” with the media spouting crowd figures which were complete BS, edited video (which omitted any shots of the Rioters committing crimes etc) and solely “reporting” the position that the Rioters wanted portrayed. Ditto for the current media “reporting” on both China and Russia.
Russia is no longer the USSR.
Its GNP ( at $1.7 trillion lags well below the other major powers at No 12
only just ahead of Australia at No 14 – $1.5 trillion and behind Canada at $1.8 trillion – 2019 figures.
China , Japan, Germany, India, UK, France, Italy, Brazil, South Korea all have larger economies.
Russia may have nuclear weapons and a large military but does not have a superpower economy
Gawd knows why you’re quoting GNP, which is the ‘value of goods and services produced by a country’s citizens no matter where they produce it.’
Given GDP is the value of goods and services produced within a country’s borders, no matter whose citizens produce it, let’s go with that;
According to the latest IMF numbers (April, IIRC), and measured on a ‘Purchase Power Parity’ basis, Russia’s economy is the 6th biggest, at $4.3 Trillion, trailing China, the US, India, Japan and Germany.
Further, IMF/World Bank forecasts for coming years have Eurasian economies capturing 40+% of all GDP growth, which will have China, India and Russia (less so Japan) rising further than the rest, at least holding their current rankings, or rising.
In the case of Russia, those forecasts have Russia rising to No 4, trailing China, the US and India (on a PPP basis) a decade or so out.
That’s optimistic, and you are conflating ‘Eurasian economies’ with the Russian one when Eurasia does not include Russia? Eurasia is made up of 13 sovereign nations including Ukraine, and does not include Russia?
Significant issue, is Russian demographic decline ‘The biggest absolute population decline between 2015 and 2050 will happen in China, followed by Japan and Russia’; especially since most Russian wealth is concentrated in cities and offshore via the City of London….. and still far behind many developed nations on infrastructure, health, pensions, education etc..
Nothing much will happen, the Democrats are still smarting over their Crimea fiasco.