The High Cost of Biden’s Meeting with Putin

About halfway through Vladimir Putin’s press conference following his summit meeting with President Joe Biden, the Russian President called on a journalist by name: “Andrei, please go ahead.”

“Vladimir Vladimirovich, have you developed any new illusions as a result of this meeting?” Andrei Kolesnikov, a correspondent for the daily Kommersant, asked.

“I never had any old illusions, and here you go talking about new ones,” Putin answered.

It was a set piece. Kolesnikov has been on the Putin beat for more than twenty-one years. Long ago, Kommersant was an irreverent newspaper, and Kolesnikov would troll the President mildly in his long, detailed reports. Through the years, Kommersant came under the Kremlin’s semi-official control, and Kolesnikov became Putin’s court journalist. They troll the world together. My colleague Susan Glasser has observed that Putin “remains world class in the art of whataboutism.” Whataboutism is a key tool of trolling—its premise is that everything is like everything else and nothing means anything. In the Kolesnikov-Putin exchange, the absence of meaning was the message.

Biden faced his own question about illusions. “Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?” a journalist asked. Biden, who had been talking for about thirty minutes, lost his temper. “I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior,” he said. “Where the hell . . . What do you do all the time? When did I say I was confident?” (He later apologized for having snapped.)

To Biden, illusions are a hazard in foreign policy; to Putin, they are its currency. Biden appears to see Putin as dangerous, untrustworthy, and intransigent. Some Russia experts who hold the same view—most notably the exiled dissident Garry Kasparov—have argued that the summit shouldn’t have happened at all. Biden was in a bind, one familiar to Americans from the four years of the Trump Presidency: he couldn’t avoid giving Putin a big, legitimizing platform.

Relations between the two countries have deteriorated to their lowest point since the nineteen-sixties. Back in March, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, left Washington for Moscow, and, a few weeks later, the U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, John Sullivan, made the same trip in reverse. In May, the Russian government added the U.S. to a “list of unfriendly countries”—a measure that required the U.S. Embassy to fire all of its non-U.S. staff. After years of dwindling activity, the Embassy was effectively gutted. This situation, in which neither country has diplomats on the ground, is existentially dangerous, given that either can destroy the world many times over, and faster than before. Reëstablishing connection was at the top of Biden’s agenda. After the meeting, he said that he and Putin had worked out a plan for preventing accidental war.

Putin’s comment about illusions new and old served as a snarky reminder that he has met with five U.S. Presidents and, we can gather, expects to meet with more. The Clinton Administration saw Putin as a young, reliable, reasonable partner, a welcome relief after the erratic Boris Yeltsin. George W. Bush famously looked into Putin’s eyes and saw his soul; his Administration regarded Russia as a partner, and based policies on the counterfactual premise that Russia was a burgeoning democracy. The Obama Administration imagined that it could sideline Putin by empowering Dmitry Medvedev, who kept Putin’s chair warm for him from 2008 to 2012. Donald Trump simply wanted to be like Putin. Every Administration’s approach made its own contribution to the dumpster fire that is Russian-American relations.

It isn’t rocket science, according to Biden. “Look, guys, I know we make foreign policy out to be this great, great skill that somehow is sort of like a secret code,” he said. “All foreign policy is is a logical extension of personal relationships. It’s the way human nature functions.” So, imagine that one of the residents of your apartment building is a monster. He gets into brawls, abuses his children, throws trash out his window, and sets off fireworks in the wee hours of the night. You’ve tried talking to him, you’ve gone to the police, but nothing has had an impact. You’ve excluded him from community spaces; this, too, has failed to change his behavior, but at least you didn’t have to see him all the time. Still, you know that he smokes in bed, increasing the risk that his giant stockpile of fireworks will explode. It seems you have to talk to him—if only to try to persuade him to store his fireworks more safely, and to insure that he lets you in if you knock. Unavoidably, even talking to him implicates you in his monstrous behavior.

Biden’s main negotiating tool appears to have been the carrot of bringing Putin back to the world stage. The summit gave Putin what he craves: being treated as an important voice in world affairs, getting a photo op with Biden, holding a press conference before Biden if not with him, being called a “worthy adversary” by the American President. Biden warned Putin that this access and respect were conditional: if the jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny were to die in prison, or if Russia waged cyberattacks on critical infrastructure in the U.S., Putin would find himself even more marginalized than he was before the summit. If there is a way to talk to Putin without harboring illusions—without pretending that he is a good-faith negotiator—this is probably it. But it comes at a cost.

Negotiations necessarily begin with establishing the interlocutors’ respective positions, making them instantly normal. Consider Navalny. Biden didn’t demand his immediate release; he demanded only that he not be killed in prison. Consider Ukraine: Biden didn’t demand that Russia withdraw from the parts of the country it has occupied, but only asked that Russia work within the framework of the Minsk agreement, a series of cease-fire agreements that would not necessarily return the occupied territories to Ukraine. Georgia, another country where Russia has occupied about a fifth of the territory, didn’t figure in either President’s account of their conversation. The very act of drawing red lines legitimizes the status quo.

Another perk of the summit for Putin is the amount of Western media attention to his person and his words. The most shameful example was a sit-down interview with the NBC correspondent Keir Simmons. The journalist asked him about being called a killer; Putin smirked, deflected, and lied. Simmons moved on to his next prepared question. It was entertaining, and Putin got the last word on a lot of people who are either dead or in jail.

The world is probably a slightly safer place following the summit. The Presidents agreed to return ambassadors to their respective postings. It’s likely that Alexey Navalny is a little safer now, too. But President Biden and this country paid a high moral price for it.