Little noticed amid this week’s Afghanistan withdrawal news, President Joe Biden held his second phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It’s a significant story.
After all, the call took place at a time when relations between Washington and Moscow are perhaps at an all-time post-Cold War low. While the White House readout was issued in a typically bland tone, one interesting nugget came out of it. Biden, presumably, floated the issue of holding a summit with Putin in a third country sometime within the next several months. Russian lawmakers and pro-Kremlin media personalities were predictably giddy, packaging the possibility of a Biden-Putin summit as a win for Moscow. The weak United States, they blared on television, has caved to mighty Russia.
Here’s a word of advice for Biden and his advisers: Cover your ears to the empty noise and press on with the summit plans. There is serious business to attend to that necessitates looking Putin in the eye.
To be sure, there is something stomach-churning about giving the adversary the time of day. But whether it’s distasteful or not is beside the point. The job of a statesman is to suck it up, put those unpleasant feelings to the side, and proceed with the business at hand. It’s what presidents have done throughout history, whether it was Richard Nixon’s meeting with China’s Mao Zedong in 1972 or Ronald Reagan’s various summits with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s.
To our national detriment, the U.S. foreign policy establishment has grown almost dismissive of the concept of high-level diplomacy with adversaries. Instead, we are led to believe, adversaries exist to be publicly slain. If a country such as Russia or China is doing something objectionable or flouting our demands, U.S. officials reach for the stick. Either through diplomatic censure, economic sanctions, or, in the most extreme cases, punitive military action, the U.S. makes its displeasure known. Anything short of submission from the other side is typically regarded as unacceptable. It’s an approach that makes compromise virtually impossible.
Unfortunately, other nations have core security interests, too. They are often resistant to giving up on these interests, even if failing to do so will result in extreme financial or diplomatic consequences. We may not like or accept how the Russian security services are persecuting Alexei Navalny, but the Kremlin’s primary internal objective is to consolidate political power and snuff out any whiff of dissent. We may blanch at China’s repeated incursions of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, yet reunifying or taming the island has been a central theme of the Chinese Communist Party for decades. Indeed, this theme was born the moment Chiang Kai-shek fled the Chinese mainland in the late 1940s.
True, we shouldn’t expect a great compromise to come out of any prospective Biden-Putin summit. Russia isn’t any more likely to give up on its security interests than is the U.S. And U.S.-Russia relations are at the bottom of the toilet. There are simply too many substantive differences between Washington and Moscow to warrant another mythical reset in the relationship. But the U.S. and Russia still have an opportunity to mitigate these substantive differences by managing them. This, too, may be too tall a task.
Still, given the fact that both nations possess over 90% of the world’s nuclear weapons arsenal, failing to try would be foreign policy malpractice. Biden deserves credit for his summit interest.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
