Biden’s Putin strategy has been in the works for decades

Joe Biden always says that foreign relations is about relationships, and he’s been developing his with Vladimir Putin for two decades.

Biden warned that Putin had dreamed of rebuilding an authoritarian empire since his days as a Delaware senator. During the campaign, he repeatedly said that he knew Putin didn’t want him to win.

From the beginning of his term as president, Biden relied on the Russian leader’s sense to guide his own response. It has even guided the way Biden deals with Putin in their conversations, repeatedly interrupting what he and his aides see as the Russian president’s strategy of going off on a tangent meant to get in the way.

According to a dozen interviews with White House officials, members of Congress and others involved in the effort, Biden deliberately worked with allies abroad to deny the Russian leader a face-to-face confrontation between Washington and Moscow that the president and his aides think Putin has. want.

Speaking publicly and privately about the war as a struggle for freedom and democracy, Biden left other leaders to talk to Putin.

He has moved to depoliticize opposition to the invasion of Ukraine, so that even among Republicans, support for Putin has been forced to the sidelines, so that smearing the Russian leader has become the main area of ​​bipartisan agreement since Biden took office. power.

This week, Biden amplified his rhetoric by calling the Russian president a “war criminal”, a “murderous dictator” and a “pure thug”.

“What Putin is trying to do is encircle Kiev,” said Representative Greg Meeks, Democrat chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “What Biden is trying to do is have the whole world surround Putin.”

Part of the lesson Biden took from getting involved as vice president during Putin’s 2014 invasion of Crimea was that NATO nations would need a much quicker, humiliating and cohesive response than months of infighting had produced such weak sanctions. that Putin faced them.

However, administration officials privately admit that if Putin had invaded Ukraine a year ago, events could have played out very differently after four years of damaging relationships with former President Donald Trump, who called NATO obsolete. .

Campaigning in 2020, Biden spoke about the confrontation. “Putin has one overriding objective: to break NATO, weaken the Western alliance, and further diminish our ability to compete in the Pacific, working with China,” Biden told Gloria Borger of CNN. “And that won’t happen in my term.”

Biden’s last conversation with Putin was on February 12, more than a week before the invasion began. And the sanctions and the international response are a result of Washington’s guidance and pressure.

The result is Putin being isolated in more than Biden had expected, along with a sustained level of attention to the war abroad and in the United States that surprised White House advisers — without restarting an 1980s-style Cold War.

“Joe Biden has known Vladimir Putin for decades and knows exactly who he is dealing with,” said a senior administration official.

Putin’s isolation

Whenever they talked, Biden would interrupt Putin as the Russian president hurled complaints that US officials see as a tactic designed to distract.

No, Biden would say, that’s not what we’re talking about, according to a senior government official who witnessed these conversations. Or, no, that’s not how things played out 20 or 25 years ago, in whatever past grievances Putin was bringing up to justify his behavior.

“President Putin cannot use many of his common tricks with President Biden, like trying to confuse people by going on long historical tangents or getting into the minutiae of politics because Biden sees these tactics coming a mile away and doesn’t accept. He will try to take President Biden off the subject by citing an obscure section of the Minsk accords or a speech someone made in the late 1990s,” a senior administration official said, adding that Biden “will always steer the conversation straight back to what he came to speak.”

Biden has always recounted the story of meeting Putin in the Kremlin in 2011, when he was vice president, and told the Russian leader, “I’m looking into your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul” – a response to the infamous 2001 comments by the Russian president. President George Bush, who said he found Putin “very direct and trustworthy” when looking him in the eye.

A Biden administration official, on the other hand, sent the CNN highlights of Biden’s story on the subject over the years, from calling Putin a “bully” in 2006 to calling him a “kleptomaniac” in 2019.

A White House aide who was at a rushed National Security Council meeting on Feb. 10 said Putin’s sense of Biden was on display throughout as he led the conversation in which the White House’s assessment of an invasion passed. from a possibility to an almost certainty.

“He was clear and clear at that meeting that he believed Putin would do this,” the aide said. “He spoke from the experience of someone who knows Putin and has dealt with Putin.”

The importance of unity

Biden thinks he wouldn’t be able to maintain current levels of unity — in the US and around the world — if Putin brought about the kind of partisan breakdown he did in 2014, when many top Republicans spoke with admiration of his strength and leadership because he was facing Barack Obama.

The current US president has not – as some of his party wants – gone after Trump, lifted the attack on the 2016 elections or attacked Republicans for voting against the former president’s first impeachment when Trump chose to withhold military aid to Ukraine.

“The crisis in Ukraine is clarifying what was at stake at the time, and there must be accountability for that,” said Representative Sean Maloney, a House Democrat. “I don’t think it makes sense to make politics with a war. I think it makes sense to be a moral voice for what is right and what is wrong – and I am proud to belong to a party, and we have a president, who knows the good guys and the bad guys in Ukraine.”

That message will not come from the president himself. “Putin wanted to divide us. We are united. It is important to send that signal to the world,” said the White House aide.

Most Republicans — with a few notable exceptions, including Trump’s clear struggle to try to erase the memory that his first response to the invasion was to call Putin “smart” and “clever” — did not attack Biden, despite many differences over the details of the president’s response.

Republicans, however, are not convinced of the other part of Biden’s strategy: calling inflation “Putin’s price hike” and “Putin’s gas tax” as an attempt to appease voters.

“These are not Putin’s gas prices. It’s President Biden’s gas prices,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said last week. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell added: “It’s pretty clear that Vladimir Putin is not the cause of this rampant inflation.”

White House aides are tracking every Republican in the House and Senate who is calling for tougher energy sanctions against Russia — preparing to try to smear them like hypocrites if they complain about higher gas prices on the campaign trail this fall. But at the same time, Biden himself keeps in touch with Republican lawmakers.

Putin has been tracking what Biden has been doing and saying about him for years. That includes friendly Russian commentators complaining in 2009 that Biden was a “gray cardinal” secretly orchestrating a tough Obama administration response to Putin’s leadership after the then-vice president said Russia was limping, or a spokesman for the Obama administration. Kremlin saying Biden’s war criminal remark was “unacceptable and unforgivable”.

Even as Biden has intensified what he has been saying about Putin, there is only how far he can go before causing the escalation he is trying to prevent.

“It hurts him to see the devastation in Ukraine, and it would be easy to say, ‘This guy is evil and we’re going to go after him and we’re going to get him,’” Meeks said. “The question is, is this the right thing? talking about the Third World War”.