The Biden-Putin Summit
Now that the much-hyped Joe Biden-Vladimir Putin summit has come and gone, what should we make of it? Here’s my quick take.
I think the meeting went reasonably well, and Biden did a decent job. Biden commented that "I did what I came to do," and he's right. On areas of disagreement with Russia (human rights, cyberattacks), he defended the U.S. and pushed back against Putin. Yet Biden also tried to find issues of common interest that both Russia and the U.S. might cooperate on (rules of the road for cyber, reinstating ambassadors, and arms control). Frankly, his performance in Geneva is as expected. After all, his preferred approach to diplomacy, even when interacting with challengers and rivals, balances a mixture of cooperation and confrontation. The Geneva summit showed how this could be applied to Russia. Going forward, I suspect Biden will try to apply a similar approach in his administration’s diplomacy with China, notwithstanding the initial Team Biden meeting with Chinese diplomats in Alaska a few months ago.
It’s a good sign that Putin said the talks were constructive and that he complimented Biden, remarking that “Biden is a professional, and you have to be very careful in working with him to make sure you don’t miss anything. He doesn’t miss anything, I can assure you.” It would've looked terrible, and probably had domestic political consequences, had he given Biden mixed reviews after lavishing praise on Trump (both recently and during Trump's time in office). Arguably, the best part of the Putin-Biden meeting is that U.S.-Russian relations are now somewhat stabilized and the level of inter-government hostility (with Biden and Putin lobbing barbs at each other for months) has been dialed down. The meeting, I believe, can set the foundation for a more normal, professional relationship between both sides.
The summit wasn't perfect, however. Toward the end of his post-summit press conference, Biden embarrassingly snapped at CNN reporter who asked him why he was “so confident” that Putin would change his behavior now that they’ve met. More troubling, Biden made a ridiculous and rather obtuse remark about U.S. election meddling: "How would it be if the United States were viewed by the rest of the world as interfering with the elections directly of other countries and everybody knew it? What would it be like if we engaged in activities that he engaged in? It diminishes the standing of a country." This is obviously a strange statement. The empirical record shows that the U.S. has repeatedly engaged in election meddling, foreign government interference, and outright regime change over the last hundred years or so. Moreover, many foreign governments and citizens do view the U.S. through the prism of American efforts to forcibly promote democracy. And lastly, a credible argument could be made that U.S. global democracy promotion efforts have been far more damaging for the U.S. and the world (Latin America, Middle East, Asia, Africa, etc.) than Russian election meddling has been for Moscow and affected governments (in the West, Ukraine, Belarus, etc).
I don't think anyone expected a major breakthrough as a result of the Biden-Putin meeting. And this summit didn't deliver one. But that's OK. Baby steps are the way to go. Russia is never going to capitulate to US demands and interests, and compromise—for both sides—is going to be tough. It's going to take slow and steady diplomacy to overcome political obstacles, bridge disagreements, and translate shared interests into real world policies. Certainly, hawkish, anti-Russian folks in the U.S. may decry American efforts to build constructive relations with Moscow, believing that Russia has to pay for all of its misdeeds over the last 15 years or so. I think this line of argument is misguided for two reasons.
First, the U.S. isn't innocent here. Because of space limitations, I won't give a recitation of post-cold war American foreign policy, but it is sufficient to say that the U.S., over the last 30 years, has knowingly and intentionally ignored, dismissed, and trampled on Russian core interests (e.g., NATO expansion, meddling in Russian politics under the guise of democracy promotion, wars in the Middle East, etc.), believing that it could get away with it all because of the structural advantages of unipolarity. Acting as if all of the problems in Russian-US ties are entirely Russia's fault ignores the empirical record, befuddles Moscow, and is a severe impediment to ironing out the array of extant bilateral problems.
Second, Donald Trump was right: it's in America's best interest, for lots of reasons, to have better, smoother ties with Russia. Russia is a large and formidable military power that possesses roughly 6000 nuclear weapons. It can make life difficult for the U.S. It can directly threaten and harm the U.S. homeland, American allies in Europe, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, among other places. Additionally, as my colleague Yohanes Sulaiman and I have previously written, the U.S. and Russia have overlapping interests on issues like stability in the Middle East and Asia, global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and global financial stability. Furthermore, given that the US is currently preoccupied and obsessed with a rising and ambitious China, it makes loads of strategic sense to be on good terms with Moscow. Russia is gravitating ever closer to Beijing over the last 20 years, creating a dangerous proto-alliance between the world’s number two and three powers. In the near future, I fully expect the U.S. to focus on figuring out if it can persuade and induce Moscow out of China’s orbit. That will be a tall, tall order. A prerequisite of such a task will depend on a minimum baseline of mutual respect, trust, and shared interests.
Questions about Trump's motives, among other things, meant that he was never going to be the one to advance the ball on improving American relations with Russia. Indeed, suspicions about Trump only emboldened Congress to take a hardline position on all matters Russia. Maybe Biden will do what Trump couldn't and place US-Russian relations on a more permanently solid footing. It's a smart and prudent policy to pursue.