Who won Wednesday’s summit meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin?
It is rare that one participant “wins” a summit — JFK’s first meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna was perhaps one such occasion. Usually, leaders restate well-known policies, and they take the measure of each other. Biden and Putin have met many times in the past. But this was the first meeting with Biden as American president.
Who won, if either of them did, will become clear only in the months and years ahead. Moreover, U.S.-Russian relations are a process, not a series of victories and defeats.
For the moment, and as superficial as it is, the question is, how did the two men look? What was their body language? How convincing were they? How self-confident did they seem? Who left the meeting feeling stronger?
Barack Obama's bet that he could do good business with Vladimir Putin turned out very badly. Obama had raised the hopes of so many people in 2008 that he had emerged, deus ex machina, as America's complete political leader — he turned out being critically unprepared in foreign policy. Obama's failures with Russia, China, Syria and Iraq, jihadism and the Islamic State, were all costly in geopolitical and human terms.
Joe Biden of course was Obama's vice-president and shares some of that responsibility. As president, however, Biden is acting with unexpected strength and confidence. The 78-year-old American president seemed more vigorous, lively and combative than his 68-year-old counterpart.
First of all, Biden seemed more convinced of his case. He arrived in Geneva after successful meetings with America's allies in the G7, NATO and the European Union. Biden’s theme of democracies vs. autocracies is mobilizing, and it puts the West on offense. European leaders responded well to it. Putin by contrast arrived having been in power for 20 years, playing the same old tune. He looked fatigued and exasperated at his post-meeting press conference.
Around the cable and network news channels, the experts gave their various predictable slants. This one criticized Biden for having lifted America's sanctions regarding the Nordstream 2 pipeline that will bring Russian natural gas under the Baltic Sea directly to Germany, bypassing Ukraine. That one criticized the American president merely for meeting Putin, giving him a global stage. Yet another asserted that it's almost always useful to talk to adversaries, and that in this case, as with China, the U.S. has common interests that can serve as a basis for cooperation outside issues of conflict.
It is far from certain that Biden is correct in saying, as he did, that foreign policy is mainly like personal relationships writ large. Bad mistakes can be made by those with little psychological insight. An infamous case is Bush 43's pronouncement that he'd looked into Putin's eyes and was “able to get a sense of his soul".
In his own press conference, Biden showed himself to be a global thinker, with an unusual knowledge, and a sympathy, for other countries’ history. About Russian history and leaders, he said that Putin, who had first been named prime minister in 1999 by the floundering semi-liberal Boris Yeltsin, had long ago given up on a liberal democratic future for Russia. He had concluded that, after all, Russia, as its history shows, is a great power only when its people are united in and by a powerful state.
Biden added — it seemed almost a slip of the tongue — that he understood Putin and Russia's eternal fear of being encircled by enemies. As to Russia's thin alliance with China, Biden noted that Russia has an over-2000 mile, vastly underpopulated and defended Siberian border with China, and that Han Chinese are unofficially colonizing Russian territory by simply moving there.
Putin, in his own press conference, showed again that he seems to have little sense of the United States as a country, a people and an idea. It is not that Putin is provincial. He has a European rather than simple Russian nationalist mentality. This begins with his deep understanding of Germany, having been a KGB intelligence officer in the German Democratic Republic for 16 years before resigning in 1991 to go into politics in Saint Petersburg.
Responding to journalists’ questions about his government’s political repression in Russia, Putin threw out a few vague counter-assertions about the Black Lives Matter movement, and 'somebody getting shot in the back'. He said he didn’t quite remember the details. And overall, he seemed noticeably less well-informed than in the past, or even just less alert, less quick on his feet. He didn’t seem bored, maybe it was frustration.
The conclusion here is that of the two men only Biden looked happy to be where he was, vigorous, ready to engage. Putin seemed weary. Whereas Biden looked and sounded sincere, confident that he was telling the truth and in simple words, Putin looked as he so often does, like a liar working hard to be mistaken as sincere.
