One of many changes we can celebrate since January 2021: We went from a president with a super-unhealthy love for Putin to one who has put him in his place.
Writing about Biden’s meeting with Putin in June of that year, Max Boot summed it up in the Washington Post: Biden wiped the smirk off Putin’s face
At Helsinki in July 2018, then-President Trump simpered and cowered. In a low point of a presidency with more low points than Death Valley, Trump accepted at face value Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denials of complicity in the 2016 election attack. Putin emerged from that meeting smirking like the cat that swallowed the canary.
As the historian Michael Beschloss noted, there was no such grin on Putin’s lips when he did his solo press conference after meeting with Biden on Wednesday. While Putin engaged in his usual dishonesty and whataboutism — he compared his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the prosecution of the Capitol rioters — his manner was subdued and far from triumphant.
He attacked the United States but was careful not to insult Biden personally. He even compared the current president favorably to his predecessor: “President Biden is an experienced statesman. He is very different from President Trump.” (Ouch. That’s got to sting for Putin’s biggest fanboy in the United States.)
This comes from many years of experience in foreign policy, as Edward-Isaac Dovere explained for CNN a month after Russia invaded Ukraine: Biden’s strategy with Putin is decades in the making
Joe Biden always says foreign relations is about relationships, and he’s been developing the one he has with Vladimir Putin for two decades.
Since the beginning of his time as President, Biden has relied on his sense of the Russian leader to guide his own response. It’s even guided the way Biden deals with Putin in their conversations, repeatedly interrupting what he and aides see as the Russian President’s strategy of going off on tangents meant to muddle and undermine.
According to a dozen interviews with White House officials, members of Congress and others involved in the effort, Biden has deliberately worked with allies abroad to deny the Russian leader the one-on-one, Washington vs. Moscow dynamic that the President and his aides think Putin wants. Publicly and privately talking about the war as a fight for freedom and democracy, Biden has left other leaders to speak with Putin.
He has moved just as deliberately at home to depoliticize opposition to the invasion of Ukraine so that, even among Republicans, support for Putin has been forced to the fringes so that vilifying the Russian leader has become the one major area of bipartisan agreement since Biden took office. This week Biden ratcheted up his rhetoric by calling the Russian President a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator” and a “pure thug.”
Or, as Nahal Tosi of CNN put it: Biden disliked Putin before it was cool
When President George W. Bush first met Vladimir Putin, he seemed smitten, describing the still-new Russian leader as “very straightforward and trustworthy,” even claiming he got “a sense of his soul.”
A certain Democratic senator from Delaware had a very different reaction.
“I don’t trust Putin,” Joe Biden said in the days after the June 2001 Bush-Putin summit in Slovenia. “Hopefully, the president was being stylistic rather than substantive.”
Twenty years later, Washington has come around firmly to Biden’s assessment.
Is there still more work to be done? 100%! Lots more work. But Biden did more than many people guessed could be done. He deserves a lot of credit. AND he deserves to be re-elected.
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These posts are written by Goodnewsroundup (Goodie),
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as well as several other notable Kossacks!
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