We should not be under any illusion about the long-term results of the Biden-Putin summit, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Andrey Sushentsov. They may well turn out to be quite ephemeral. However, the fact that the United States is beginning to take inventory of its own interests in relation to Russia for the first time is evidence of the beginning of a new era in bilateral relations.
The Russian-American summit in Geneva on June 16 predictably triggered a flurry of comments that first prophesied failure and went on to explain why the agreements which were reached could not be fulfilled by the parties. The American media was especially zealous; even at the final press conference, they attacked President Joe Biden with sharp questions about how he can do business with Russia, inasmuch as it is (allegedly) responsible for a large number of American problems. However, at least four key components of the new American policy towards Russia are reasons for cautious optimism regarding the future of bilateral relations. Taken together, they make the agreements reached more substantial than one might expect.
First, for the first time in four years, there is a team in the White House that isn’t sabotaging itself. The extremely specific organisational style of the previous US President Donald Trump, opposition from his opponents from the Democratic Party and sabotage from part of the Trump Administration’s own bureaucracy led to an actual split in the United States. In this regard, any agreement was accompanied by grandiose internal political scandals and could not be implemented due to the big problems within the United States.
With the arrival of Joe Biden’s team in the White House, this situation ended. The government has a mandate of confidence from Congress, and there is a sigh of relief in Washington, which is 90% Democratic. At least on the horizon of the year, the White House will not experience such acute pressure from the Republicans as on the eve of the next midterm or presidential elections.
The fact that the teams of the Russian and American presidents were preparing a full-scale summit, and not a short meeting on the side-lines of an international conference to exchange reproaches, also speaks to the non-zero chance of the summit’s agreements being implemented. Judging by indirect indications, the preparatory meeting of Sergey Lavrov with his counterpart, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Nikolay Patrushev with Jake Sullivan, went better than on the eve of the previous summit in Finland in 2018. The fact that the two countries were able to agree on a common agenda for the meeting — and it was quite broad — speaks to the professionalism of the two teams, between them there was even some shared, mutual respect.
It is also indicative that the leaders of the two countries brought large delegations to Geneva, and in parallel with the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden, several working meetings were held in narrow formats in the halls of the Villa La Grange mansion.
The second reason inspiring optimism is that the summit with Russia was initiated in the United States by the same team that was responsible for resetting relations under Obama. Joe Biden’s cabinet, in addition to himself, and he was responsible for politics towards Eastern Europe, Ukraine and Russia in the Obama administration. Together with Biden, it includes Antony Blinken, John Kerry, Bill Burns, Samantha Power and other people who have worked in the Obama administration. They have no illusions that Russia will be easy to come to terms with, but they have a realistic outlook regarding what Russia’s interests are and they hopefully have worked on their mistakes. What exactly was this error correction? They finally took the trouble to find out exactly what Russia wants from the United States, and what its interests are.
This brings us to the third point.
Finally, the fourth factor is probably key. It consists of the fact that the American president now has a different sense of the leading process in the world. There is no determinism in the sense of Barack Obama, who believed that the United States is on the right side of history, and whatever it does, it will always be right. In his poignant response to controversial press questions, Joe Biden said probably more than he’d planned. He shared his observation that in the past three-five years, the world has reached a fundamental fork in the road that will reveal the direction of the development of the event for the next decade. He was asked the question: “How can we maintain our global leadership?” For him, it ceased to be obvious that the United States retained global leadership is an unconditional and uncontested scenario, which means that he stopped looking down on Russia as a country that is permanently mistaken and will be permanently forced to admit its mistakes, ultimately returning to the fold of the West.
