America and Russia return to traditional great-power diplomacy

JOE BIDEN was 12 in 1955 when Dwight Eisenhower sat down in Geneva with Nikita Khrushchev for the first bilateral summit between the leaders of America and the Soviet Union. The current American president was a 42-year-old senator working on arms control when Ronald Reagan sat on a sofa with Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time in the same city, taking what turned out to be the first step towards ending the cold war.

On June 16th it was Mr Biden’s turn to encounter Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, who has undermined many of the achievements of the post-cold-war order and revived some of the worst Soviet practices. But although the location was the same, the plot was different. This was not a summit between two superpowers holding the fate of the world in their hands. Nor was it an attempt to have another reset of the relationship, as Barack Obama tried. Rather it was something a bit murkier.

The purpose of the meeting was to manage an ongoing confrontation by firming up red lines, clarifying the rules of engagement and getting a measure of each other’s weaknesses. The only concrete agreements were to start a new round of nuclear talks and to return ambassadors to their posts. These are both small but solid wins. The fact that this return to diplomacy produced a sigh of relief was a measure of how difficult relations have become since Russia annexed Crimea and launched a war in Ukraine in 2014.

The summit was a departure from the psychodrama of Donald Trump’s relationship with Mr Putin. American diplomats shudder to recall a press conference in Helsinki at which Mr Trump said he had no reason to distrust Mr Putin. There was no joint press conference this time. But after less than four hours meeting in an 18th-century villa, Mr Putin and Mr Biden knew where the other man stood: cyber-attacks on vital infrastructure were off limits; disputes over Ukraine and Belarus should not be resolved by military means. Killing Alexei Navalny, the jailed opposition leader, would bring devastating consequences but, regrettable as human-rights abuses are, they should be treated separately from security. In cold-war parlance, there was more than a hint of détente.

Mr Biden has recast the relationship in grand terms, as a contest between democracy and autocracy, represented this week by Russia, though principally by China. He put his meeting with Mr Putin in the context of renewed unity within the G7 and NATO. His style and rhetoric were meant to highlight how different he is from Mr Trump. His mantra is “to restore predictability and stability” to America’s relations with Russia, to create a basis for relations to be workmanlike if also adversarial, rather as they were with the Soviet Union.

The problem was that the man who sat across from him in Geneva was not a Soviet-style leader constrained by ideology, party hierarchy and, most important, the experience of common victory in the second world war.

He is, rather, a product of the Soviet collapse. He presides over a kleptocratic regime dominated by violent security services. It is a regime that cares more about wealth than ideology, and is preoccupied with its own survival rather than a global contest with America, let alone the interests of the Russian people. It thrives on disorder. It has invaded neighbouring countries, poisoned its opponents, and waged cyber- and information warfare against the West. Mr Putin talks of restoring Russia’s greatness while allowing his cronies to loot its resources.

The danger is that Mr Biden’s tough-sounding rhetoric will be a substitute for tough action, rather than a precursor to it. The genesis of the summit in this respect may be more illustrative than its outcome.

In March, two months after his inauguration, which coincided with the return to Russia and imprisonment of Mr Navalny, Mr Biden called Mr Putin a murderer. Mr Putin smirked, ominously wished Mr Biden good health and suggested they meet and debate on television. Mr Biden’s office replied that the president had better things to do that weekend.

A few weeks later Mr Putin massed a vast army on Ukraine’s eastern border. At the same time, he brought down the entire weight of his domestic-security apparatus to crush Mr Navalny’s movement and purge Russian politics of meaningful dissent. Some dissidents fled the country. Mr Putin suffocated the few remaining independent media outlets by labelling them “foreign agents”, thus scaring off advertisers. To drive home the message to Washington, Russian spooks hacked into American human-rights groups and think-tanks that criticised Mr Putin.

Russia’s Ukrainian war-drums got Mr Biden’s attention; and he suggested a summit. His team hoped that making a concession to Mr Putin’s vanity would incline him to cause less trouble. Meanwhile, they hoped to project a new example of democratic vitality and global leadership.

Mr Biden then gave Mr Putin another win, this time overruling the objections of his top aides by waiving sanctions on one of the firms behind the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline that Russia is building under the Baltic Sea to Germany, bypassing Poland and Ukraine. Mr Biden meant this as a concession not to Russia but to Germany and to reality (the pipeline is 90% complete). Yet Mr Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, who learned about America’s decision only from the media, considered it a big win for Russia.

Mr Putin has signalled that he, too, is interested in a “predictable and stable” relationship—by which he means that America should predictably stay out of Russia’s affairs and its backyard. In the hope of drawing his own red lines, he pre-empted the summit by outlawing Mr Navalny’s movement as “extremist”, threatening to annihilate Ukraine were NATO to move closer, and backing Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, who last month hijacked a Ryanair flight in order to arrest an opponent.

If Mr Biden needs to dial down tensions with Russia so that he can focus on a more pressing contest with China, Mr Putin needs a form of détente with America, so that he can focus on the more urgent business of repressing dissent and rebuilding his empire. “Over the past few years the Kremlin appears to have come to the conclusion that it cannot simultaneously eliminate risks to its rule at home while also fighting against the West at an ever-rising economic cost,” says Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council, a think-tank.

Whereas Mr Biden, like Mr Obama before him, sees Russia as a distraction, Mr Putin sees America and its values as an existential threat. “If Putin were to fulfil Biden’s wish-list, release all political prisoners, withdraw from Crimea and Donbas, [and] concede to the West on other key points, it would result in the collapse of the existing regime,” says Dmitri Trenin, the director of the Carnegie Moscow Centre, a think-tank. In his press conference Mr Putin tried to justify his repression by calling his political opponents American agents and pointing to America’s own injustices, from gun crime to Guantanamo Bay.

For now, Mr Putin’s gambit appears to have paid off. Progress on nuclear agreements and the return of ambassadors lend a veneer of legitimacy to a rogue regime that is prepared to sacrifice lives to protect its wealth and power. But it remains to be seen whether the summit, and the ones to come, will make Mr Putin’s regime less dangerous. Fiona Hill, who served on the National Security Council under Mr Trump, argues that Mr Putin’s kleptocracy has become one of the biggest security threats for Western governments, along with crippling cyber-attacks. “We have to show that we are prepared to hold the line with action, not just words. Otherwise we are simply inviting Russia to move in.” ■

A version of this article was published online on June 16th 2021

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