President Joe Biden returned from a swing through Europe voicing optimism while starting a six-month clock during which the two countries will start nuclear security talks and the United States will determine whether the Kremlin has cracked down on cyberattacks from its soil.
“We’ll find out within the next six months to a year, whether or not there is actually a strategic dialogue that matters with Russia,” Biden told reporters during a news conference on the final day of his weeklong visit with European allies and partners. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on his final day, a meeting that began with Russian security scuffling the press pool and ended with the two leaders taking questions in separate press conferences.
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An anticipated showdown never materialized.
Coming out of the meeting, the leaders said they would not go to nuclear war against one another but had few other points of agreement.
James Cameron, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oslo and a historian of nuclear strategy and arms control, said the outcome of the meeting, to restart strategic stability talks and reiterating an agreement not to go to nuclear war, was expected but welcome.
But it is just the start. “We’ll find out within the next six months to a year whether we actually have a strategic dialogue that matters,” Cameron said.
Biden flattered his opponent before the summit, calling him a “worthy adversary.” The meeting in scenic Geneva, Switzerland, was between “two great powers,” a boost from when former President Barack Obama relegated Putin’s Russia from the world stage to a “regional power” division.
Putin returned the favor. “I want to say that the image of President Biden that our and even the American press paints has nothing to do with reality,” he told reporters, calling the 78-year-old Democrat both ”experienced” and “balanced.”
“You can tell that at first glance,” Putin quipped.
Speaking to reporters, Biden argued that both sides could score a victory by working together.
“This is not about just our self-interest,” the president said. “It’s about a mutual self-interest.”
But Putin, a former KGB agent, took no responsibility for cyberattacks on U.S. companies and infrastructure and deflected criticism over the treatment of political opponent Alexei Navalny.
Instead, the message from the meeting was that the two countries would keep talking.
It was not a “Kumbaya” meeting, but there “were no threats,” Biden said. Those he leveled after, promising “action” if cyberthreats from groups operating inside Russia persist.
The mutual interest angle was echoed by a senior administration official speaking to reporters after the meeting, who described the talks as “direct … constructive, nonpolemical, and very matter-of-fact.”
While Biden’s straight-talk “doesn’t mean that’s going to convince [Putin] at all … maybe it lessens a little bit the possibility of miscommunication, misunderstanding,” this person said.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan cited “three or four different areas” on which the White House will determine potential for progress in the months ahead, “or whether we will simply have to take action to safeguard our interests.”
“One of those areas is in the cyberdomain and, in particular, on critical infrastructure,” he said. Another will be whether the White House views “tangible progress” being made around arms control.
Putin has denied cyberhacking activities by his government and taken issue with other criticism by the U.S. In Geneva, he accused Washington of targeting its citizens.
“Of the question of whom is murdering whom, people rioted and went into the Congress in the U.S. with political demands, and many people were declared as criminals, and they are threatened with imprisonment from 20 to 25 years,” Putin said, through an interpreter.
He added, “We sympathize with what was happening in the States, but we do not wish for that to happen in Russia.”
The White House sought to manage expectations throughout Biden’s trip, promising “no deliverables” and tamping down talk of major developments in the return to multilateralism.
Still, the mood was buoyant. French President Emmanuel Macron said, “I think it’s great to have a U.S. president part of the club and very willing to cooperate.”
“Biden had a pretty simple task here, which was not all that complicated but merely to assure allies that, as he has said now repeatedly, ‘America is back.’ It was a very simple mission. They all know him, and he knows them. And so, that wasn’t to me — I give him credit, but it wasn’t a real heavy lift for him,” former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin told the Washington Examiner.
Former and current officials touted the meeting as a success.
“Was everything achieved and could have been? There’s no way that’s ever true of a meeting,” said John Gans, author of White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American Way of War and chief speechwriter to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter during the Obama administration. “No president achieved every single thing.”
Sullivan, citing Macron, told reporters on Thursday that “Biden returns from this trip as the clear, and the consensus, leader of the free world.”
“I really do not believe that it is hyperbole to say that,” he said.
For some Republicans, Biden’s swing through Europe was a missed opportunity.
The visit was “a real dereliction of duty” by Biden, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said in an interview with local news station KTVI. “He doesn’t have much to show for it.”
“What we needed out of our G-7 partners [was] a strong alliance against China. China is the most serious, most pressing national security threat and economic threat, for that matter, for our country,” Hawley said.
A senior administration official said the leaders discussed “some of the ideas and efforts around both the cooperative elements, the competitive elements, the adversarial elements of the relationship with China, and [how to] turn those into something more than just words.”
Biden “made a forceful — some forceful comments about kind of putting values and actions [and] call some of those things out publicly,” he said. “That was some of the space where there was some interesting discussions and a little bit of a differentiation of opinion on not whether, kind of, the threat is there, but on how strong, from an action perspective, I think, different G-7 members are willing to take things.”
Amid objections by other leaders, the final message was less robust than the U.S. had wanted and did not mention China specifically in remarks on forced labor or refer to Uyghurs directly.
Still, Biden said on Sunday, “I’m satisfied.”
Before departing Washington, Biden promised a plan to distribute 500 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine to poor and middle-income countries by next year, and lined up with allies for the first in-person G-7 meeting since the coronavirus pandemic, the group pledged additional aid.
But it wasn’t a prominent focus of the events, Gans said.
“I was surprised in how little COVID was on the real agenda or really in the public presentation of discussion of the G-7. Not just on the American side but in general,” Gans said.
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Coronavirus cases are still rising in many places, including in Cornwall, where the meeting was hosted, and which saw numbers increase tenfold in the lead-up to the summit, according to reports.
“That probably has something to do with the Putin of it all,” Gans said.
