Biden and Putin: A Quest for Engagement in Geneva

However, these disagreements should not always prevent Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden from engaging each other into situational deals in places like Afghanistan or even Syria. Apparently, the two Presidents had no time in Geneva to discuss any of such deals in detail. However, one could imagine, for instance, an extension of the UN Security Council Resolution 2533 on the humanitarian assistance to the population of Idlib going across the Turkish-Syrian border, in exchange for a US agreement to increase aid flows via Damascus. This would not make Putin and Biden see eye to eye on the Syrian settlement, but it would definitely help avoid a humanitarian catastrophe in Idlib. 

Regretfully, such situational deals are much more difficult to reach in Europe than elsewhere. The United States is not in a position to make Russia change its current attitude on the situation in Belarus and to convince the Russian leadership to push harder for radical constitutional reforms. The US leverage for dealing with Alexander Lukashenko is very limited; very few sticks remain available, and the carrots are practically nonexistent. 

Ukraine is an even harder nut to crack in the US-Russian bilateral framework: Washington is not a part of the Normandy process; it has not signed the Minsk Agreements and bears no responsibility for their implementation. No doubt, Joe Biden reconfirmed the official US position on the territorial integrity of Ukraine and assured Kyiv that the door to the NATO Alliance remains open. Nevertheless, the current status quo in Donbas appears to be, if not a desirable option, an acceptable one for the Biden Administration. Besides, it also seems that Ukraine, despite all the hopes and expectations in Kyiv, is not on the very top of Biden’s foreign policy priorities list. Washington has nothing against outsourcing the Donbas problem to its European allies. 

China, on the contrary, is not something that Joe Biden can easily outsource to anyone else. In a way, the Geneva meeting with Vladimir Putin appeared to be a dress rehearsal for a future meeting of President Biden with Chairman Xi. Though it remains unclear whether they discussed China in Geneva at any length, the shadow of Beijing was undoubtedly present in the rooms of Villa La Grange. The Biden Administration should have no illusions nurtured by its predecessors about the United States being in a position to deconstruct the Russian-Chinese strategic partnership and to bring Moscow to the "right side of history". The odds are that this partnership will only grow stronger under the US pressure on the two countries. However, the Biden Administration might well cautiously explore potential wrinkles in the Moscow-Beijing friendship. For instance, it might incentivize Russia to team up with the United States in the Arctic Council, to contain the Chinese advance to the Arctic region. Or it might cautiously encourage the Russian-Indian defense cooperation to help India balance the rising Chinese military power in Asia. 

As for Vladimir Putin, he should be fully aware of the growing asymmetries in relations between Moscow and Beijing. Probably, in his ideal world, Russia should become a global swing state capable of balancing the emerging US-Chinese geopolitical competition. But the Russian President should have no illusions either: in the observable future, Russia cannot possibly claim the role of an honest broker between the two superpowers - its relations with Washington are so poor that it does not even make any sense to talk about a US-Russia-China geopolitical triangle; it is rather a China-Russia informal alliance against the United States. 

In Putin’s mindset, the United States has no legal or even moral right to raise these issues, given the many problems with the US political system that manifested themselves over the last couple of years.

This sensitivity explains why the Russian side was so persistent in its attempts to engage the US into some kind of bilateral consultations on cyber. While in the United States, they consider the alleged Russian cyber-attacks as unprovoked unilateral hostile acts, within the Russian leadership there is a genuine anxiety about what it believes to be a systematic and large-scale US interference into the Russian political life, including multifaceted activities of American media, foundations, NGOs, think tanks and so on. With elections in the Russian State Duma scheduled for September, this anxiety is likely to get even higher within the next three months. No comprehensive solution for the "interference" problem between Moscow and Washington is likely to emerge anytime soon, but the US agreement to start working with Russia on cyber matters is already a significant victory for Russian diplomacy. 

The two sides agreed in Geneva to bring their respective ambassadors back to Washington and Moscow. This is a necessary, but not a sufficient precondition for restoring the diplomatic dimension of the relationship. Just like even the best generals cannot accomplish much without their armies, ambassadors cannot serve as a substitution for the Embassy staff. Anatoly Antonov and John Sullivan are not going to stamp visas, manage media relations, meet with mid-level local bureaucrats and do many other things on their own: they will need their people back. 

At his press-conference in Geneva, President Biden argued that the next couple of months will make it clear whether the new model of US-Russian relations can work or not. One can only hope that it will, demonstrating the ability of two very different nations to find a mutually agreeable modus operandi. 

If the United States and Russia are successful, their experience could be applied to a broader multilateral framework. In a way, the US-Russian puzzle is nothing but a specific reflection of a universal challenge that the contemporary international system faces today. On the one hand, the world is getting more and more diverse, and the West no longer has the monopoly on setting the rules or on pointing humankind into the right direction. On the other hand, the world, the setbacks of globalization notwithstanding, is moving towards more interconnectedness and more interdependence. The need to make everybody play by the rules is greater than it has ever been.

Therefore, we have to define rules in such a way that they will be generally acceptable to liberal democracies and to illiberal autocracies, to mature and to emerging economies, to great and to small nations, to the West and to the East, to the global North and to the global South. These rules could be less than perfect; they will not exclude competition and even confrontation. But they should be perceived by international players as fair and legitimate. If we define such rules, we will enjoy more stability, albeit at a low level. If we do not, we might get into a shipwreck of an epic scale.    
    
 

Copyright: Alexander Zemlianichenko / POOL / AFP