Biden keeps talking about displays of strength heading into the meeting, but the ultimate display would be to cancel the talks, before conceding more.
As President Biden begins his “America is back tour”— his first trip abroad as president — there’s been a lot of discussion about a Biden doctrine, the administration’s approach to alliances, and how it will work to maintain America’s role in the world post-pandemic. On a more tactical level, we’re seeing the emergence of a certain Biden playbook when it comes to engaging with authoritarian regimes.
Biden and other top officials have identified the authoritarian challenge to democratic institutions — a battle that Secretary of State Antony Blinken once referred to as a battle between techno-democracies and techno-autocracies — as the defining challenge of the 21st century. Yet they’ve also kept the door open to engagement with such regimes.
Early on in the administration, that has taken the form of meetings between senior U.S. officials and their Chinese counterparts. Now, as Biden eyes a revitalization of the transatlantic alliance, Russia is getting the same treatment. Before sitting down with Vladimir Putin, Biden will first attend the G-7, NATO, and U.S.–EU summits, in addition to holding bilateral meeting with a number of Western leaders.
The Biden playbook for engagement with China and Russia is straightforward enough. The administration isn’t so starry-eyed as to meet with adversaries without first having some show of strength under its belt. So officials also talk up America’s domestic, post-COVID recovery (Jake Sullivan did this on Monday), economic strength, and the administration’s efforts to craft a “foreign policy for the middle class.”
Then, they make a show of visiting a number of Washington’s allies in the days leading up to a final meeting. This is what Blinken did ahead of the March summit in Anchorage, making stops in Tokyo and Seoul before finally touching down in Alaska for the explosive talks. Biden is doing the same this week ahead of his June 16 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva, telegraphing that he has a united group of the world’s democracies behind him, as he prepares to demand a number of concessions from the Russian dictator. Biden told an audience of U.S. service members stationed in the U.K. last night he would, “let [Putin] know what I want him to know.”
This approach to meeting with Russian and Chinese officials makes a lot of sense — if it makes sense to hold such summits at all. In Anchorage, part of the reason Yang Jianli, Beijing’s top diplomat, began with a belligerent tirade is that the Chinese side was thoroughly incensed that the U.S. had orchestrated a show of support with countries in the Indo-Pacific before the meeting. The administration’s signal was unmistakably clear, but it likely could have done without the meeting, and without Yang’s 17-minute lecture.
As far as next week’s Biden–Putin summit is concerned, the U.S. president doesn’t even have all of the sequencing right. While it’s promising that he’s holding meetings with America’s allies, he’s left Ukraine out in the cold, only extending a White House invitation to President Volodymyr Zelensky after he sounded off on Biden’s stance toward the Nord Stream 2 pipelinein an interview with Axios. An official told the outlet that Zelensky hadn’t been invited to Washington because of corruption concerns — but just a day after the Ukrainian president’s interview, the invitation was extended nonetheless.
Meanwhile, it’s worth asking if Putin has more to gain from a summit’s domestic political impact than Biden will be able to achieve in terms of stabilizing the bilateral relationship. Already, the Kremlin has taken a hard stance ahead of the talks, cracking down on organizations affiliated with dissident Alexei Navalny earlier this week. Biden’s talking tough, but that might not translate to tangible outcomes in Geneva.
Even John Sullivan, Washington’s Russia envoy, has reportedly voiced such a concern about the administration’s handling of Russia policy. According to a CNN report citing two sources: “Sullivan suggested that Putin is not acting in good faith with the US and the Biden administration risks repeating the same mistakes of its predecessors if it does not approach the issue with clear eyes, according to one of the sources.” The piece goes on to contextualize his comments:
The overarching theme of Sullivan’s briefing was that Putin “has not really changed his stripes,” said the first source, despite efforts by the current administration and its predecessors to curb Putin’s malign behavior with sticks, like sanctions, and to shape Russia’s actions in other areas using diplomacy, including through in-person engagements.
Sullivan’s warnings are emblematic of the concerns that officials and lawmakers have expressed ahead of the summit, which is set to be held next week after Biden meets with NATO and European allies in the United Kingdom and Belgium. And within Biden’s administration there has been vigorous debate about the right way to engage with Putin, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, particularly within the State Department.
From Biden’s unconditional renewal of the New START treaty, to the State Department’s decision to pull its punches on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, there’s not much reason for optimism about the Geneva summit. The administration keeps talking about displays of strength heading into the meeting, but the ultimate such display would be to cancel the talks, before conceding anything more.