White House press secretary Jen Psaki turned criticisms of President Joe Biden’s newly announced summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin into a shot at Biden’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump.
Psaki, fielding questions at Tuesday’s press briefing, said the meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, shows that Biden “is not afraid of standing up to our adversaries.”
“We may have forgotten over the last couple of years, but this is how diplomacy works,” she added in response to criticisms raised by Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and other Republicans that the meeting is rewarding Putin’s bad behavior.
“We don’t work together. We don’t meet with people only when we agree. It’s actually important to meet with leaders when we have a range of disagreements, as we do with Russian leaders,” she continued. “So we don’t regard the meeting with the Russian president as a reward. We regard it as a vital part of defending America’s interests, and President Biden is meeting with Vladimir Putin because of our country’s differences, not in spite of them.”
BIDEN-PUTIN SUMMIT SET FOR JUNE 16 IN GENEVA
Her comments come after four years of Trump’s “America first” foreign policy, when the 45th president shunned America’s longtime role as a global leader on a range of matters. Democrats warned that Trump eroded the United States’s influence, echoed at times by some Republicans, but certainly not all, on Capitol Hill.
The top White House spokeswoman called the Putin summit, and potential future meetings with other adversaries, “an opportunity to raise concerns where we have them and, again, to move toward a more stable and predictable relationship.”
Later in the briefing, Psaki said the White House did not attach any “preconditions” on scheduling the meeting.
“We don’t see this meeting as an opportunity to just talk about everything we agree on. We see this as a diplomatic opportunity for the United States,” she reiterated. “We think that it is in our interests to have the meeting, which is why we proposed it to the president.”
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Tuesday’s briefing in its entirety is below.
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