When President Joe Biden told officials earlier this spring that he wanted to meet with his Russian counterpart for a summit soon, his team moved quickly to make it happen, even if some questioned what he hoped to accomplish.
The previous two administrations, including the one in which Biden served as vice president, attempted but failed to improve relations with Moscow. Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously hijacked meetings with outlandish whataboutism, according to experienced foreign policy advisers. They were unsure what benefit Biden could gain from meeting him now, less than six months into his presidency.
The summit was the subject of internal debate, with supporters and skeptics forming a divide. A series of provocations, ranging from ransomware attacks carried out by Russian criminal networks to the treatment of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, prompted more debate about whether the time was right for a meeting. According to CNN, Biden’s ambassador to Russia privately warned lawmakers that if the administration does not approach relations with Putin with clear eyes, it risks repeating the mistakes of its predecessors.
Despite two phone conversations with Putin, Biden remained convinced that face-to-face meetings were the only way to truly engage the notoriously combative leader.
And after more than 40 years of watching other presidents make foreign policy decisions, it was finally his turn.
While his domestic agenda is mired in Washington gridlock, Biden’s arrival in Europe on Wednesday for his first presidential trip abroad is the culmination of decades spent circling the center of the US foreign policy establishment, helping to hone America’s role abroad at times but being sidelined at others as his views were ignored or mocked.
Biden, who is frequently dispatched to conduct messy or mostly hopeless diplomacy deemed too difficult for anyone else, will have a very different experience this week, speaking to foreign leaders as an equal rather than as someone else’s envoy.
It’s a job he’s wanted for a long time, but one that now comes with new challenges, such as the pandemic and crucial vaccine distribution decisions.
Even in the face of skepticism, his determination to meet Putin reflects a deeply held belief, according to officials, that cultivating a personal relationship — even with the most authoritarian of leaders — is the only way to deal bluntly with the world’s major issues. Putin, according to Biden’s team, will only respond to strength and honesty.
“There is never any substitute for leader-to-leader engagement, particularly for complex relationships, but with Putin this is exponentially the case,” Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said this week.
“He has a highly personalized style of decision making and so it is important for President Biden to be able to sit down with him face to face, to be clear about where we are, to understand where he is, to try to manage our differences, and to identify those areas where we can work in America’s interests to make progress.”
The stakes of Biden’s first trip abroad, in his opinion, are nothing less than democracy itself. A highly symbolic choreography will take him from a Group of Seven meeting on the Cornish coast in England to a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium, before concluding with the Putin summit in Geneva, Switzerland, where Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev first met 36 years ago on the lakeside.
Biden comes with the self-described mission of demonstrating that democracy can still work in the face of authoritarian threats, a message complicated by the historic strains on American democracy unfolding at home.
After four years of strain under President Donald Trump, Biden planned his trip to highlight traditional American alliances.
Asked before his departure what his goals for the trip were, Biden told reporters: “Making clear to Putin and to China that Europe and the United States are tight and the G7 is gonna move.”
Biden will also try to reassure allies about America’s role in the coronavirus vaccine distribution.
According to two sources, the President is expected to make a major announcement about global production while at the G-7 summit on Thursday. One of Biden’s top coronavirus advisers, Jeff Zients, is accompanying him on his first trip, indicating the importance of the pandemic.
As he walked away from Joint Base Andrews, Biden stated that he will be announcing a global vaccine strategy, but he did not provide any details.
The visit to Cornwall comes as officials in the administration have grown increasingly concerned about the highly infectious virus variant known as Delta, which was first discovered in India but is now considered to be prevalent in the United Kingdom.
Europeans, on the other hand, are skeptical that another president, possibly Trump himself, could reverse anything Biden does or says. He’ll also have to deal with rising tensions with the United States in the aftermath of the pandemic, after only recently beginning to share vaccines with the rest of the world.
“The trans-Atlantic alliance is back,” Biden told allies in a speech shortly after taking office. “And we are not looking backward. We are looking forward, together.”
Biden’s domestic agenda is in jeopardy as bipartisan talks on infrastructure collapse and other legislative priorities, such as voting rights, appear to be in jeopardy. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff and a longtime aide to Biden, will remain in Washington to ensure that those priorities are met.
Biden’s domestic agenda is in jeopardy as bipartisan talks on infrastructure collapse and other legislative priorities, such as voting rights, appear to be in jeopardy. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff and a longtime aide to Biden, will remain in Washington to ensure that those priorities are met.
Biden has more international experience than the previous four American presidents combined. While he has focused his first months in office on solving problems within the United States, primarily the pandemic and its accompanying economic crisis, aides say foreign policy is still his “first love.”
