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66 Opinion
bne July 2021
ECFR:
Biden meets Putin: America, Russia, and the return of diplomacy
Kadri Liik an ECFR Senior Policy Fellow
Joe Biden is the fifth American president to hold a bilateral summit with Vladimir Putin. But he is likely
the first post-cold war US president to have a realistic understanding of what Russia is and what it wants – and what the United States can or cannot do about it, or with it. This
is evident from the way he has positioned himself on Russia since elected – signalling to Moscow that he fundamentally disagrees on many issues but still sees a need to talk and work with it on other issues where necessary.
And this positioning culminated in what can only be called a good summit.
What made this so was less the concrete deliverables, but the basis from which they arose: the participants holding clear perceptions of themselves, of each other, and of the state of the world; a proper assessment of the leverage they may or not may have; and a correct understanding of the things they can change and those they cannot. Encounters that are based on an adequate comprehension of oneself and others are always ultimately healthy and good, even if they are hard to have or produce little in terms of immediate results.
But on this occasion the results were above expectations, even if those expectations were modest. The US and Russia agreed
to start talks on strategic stability – which is good news for everyone, after the devastation that the Trump administration wreaked on international arms control agreements. The two sides also agreed to start talks on cyber-security, potentially extending arms control into the realm of cyber, which would
be a historic first. Still, the most important outcome might yet be that they found the start of a modus vivendi for managing their mutual relationship. The US-Russia relationship in the years to come is bound to be replete with disagreements and divergences. They will doubtless find themselves at loggerheads on various issues rather than engaged in partnership. But Geneva may have laid the foundation for managing that relationship in ways that are shorn of excessive expectations and ambitions, but hopefully also of paranoia and misreadings.
Hopes and fears
Many in the West may have wanted more from the summit – for Biden to confront Putin and make him change his
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The Geneva summit recalled the power of old-fashioned diplomacy and working patiently at difficult problems.
behaviour in Ukraine, Belarus and towards Alexey Navalny. Such wishes are noble but unrealistic – and such an approach would likely have been counter-productive.
Biden has become president at a time when the world order is in flux and doubts are mounting over the future extent of US power. This means that Russia no longer feels the need to fit into the US-led world as it did for much of the past 30 years. The sort of leverage that former presidents could always draw on is now gone.
Maybe paradoxically, the relative decline of US power has not caused Russia to relax. On the contrary, lately it has viewed the US with increased paranoia and defiance. Moscow does not believe in an imminent renaissance of Western power. But it has spent the months since November suspecting that the West – reunited under Biden – might use its disagreements with Moscow to try to imitate such a renaissance; that by teaming up against Russia it will seek to create an illusion of its former hegemony, and thus to compensate for, and obscure, its actual lack of hegemony.
These concerns have been magnified by Moscow’s acute awareness that the Kremlin’s domestic political legitimacy is waning, which fuels fears that the West will exploit that weakness and try to return to the relationship model of a bygone era: lecturing Russia about democracy and trying to expand the reach of Western institutions.
Such a combination of vulnerability, fear and defiance is what lies behind many recent actions by Moscow – from
its treatment of Navalny, whom Moscow now erroneously seems to view as a political agent of the West, to military escalation on the border with Ukraine – where Moscow, again erroneously, seems to have worried that Kyiv, emboldened
by the US and Europe, might walk away from the Minsk agreements or even draw inspiration from Azerbaijan’s military success in Nagorno-Karabakh and try to retake Donbas by force.
Diplomacy returns?
Such pre-emptive defence is likely to remain Moscow’s modus operandi for the coming years. This is a dangerous fact: if incidents continue to pile up the way they did this past spring,