President Biden has built his foreign policy towards Russia based on how he has felt about his personal relationship with President Putin over the decades.
Since he became a senator from Delaware, Mr Joe Biden believe that the President Vladimir Putin want to restore the glory of Russia in the Soviet era. During the election campaign, he also repeatedly said that the Russian President did not want to see him win.
White House officials say that unlike their predecessors Donald TrumpPresident Biden has deliberately avoided face-to-face meetings with Putin, which he says Moscow is trying to achieve to demonstrate equality with the United States.
Instead, he allowed other Western leaders to discuss with the Russian President. When the Ukraine crisis broke out, the US President did not participate in direct diplomatic efforts with Russia, but shuttle diplomacy was carried out by leaders in Europe.
“What Putin wants to do is put pressure on Kiev,” said Democrat Greg Meeks, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “And what President Biden is doing is letting the whole world put pressure on Putin.”
US President Joe Biden speaks with his Russian counterpart in Wilmington, Delaware, USA on December 30, 2021. Photo: White House.
Part of the lessons Biden learned after Russia annexed the peninsula Crimea 2014 is that NATO members need to react faster and more cohesively than spend months of internal debate introducing weak sanctions. However, White House officials have also acknowledged that if Putin had entered Ukraine a year ago, things could have turned out to be much different, after four years of fractured US-NATO relations under former President Trump.
Even during the 2020 election campaign, Biden mentioned the confrontation between Russia and the West. “President Putin has an important goal of destroying NATOweaken the Western alliance and further reduce our competitiveness in the Pacific by cooperating with China,” Biden said in an interview two years ago. That didn’t happen when I was in power.”
The most recent phone call between the two presidents took place on February 12, more than a week before the military campaign began. After Russia launched its campaign in Ukraine, the US directed and pressured its allies and partners to launch an unprecedented series of sanctions against Moscow, despite President Biden’s barely present.
“President Biden has known Putin for decades and understands exactly who he is dealing with,” said a government official.
It even influenced the way Biden spoke to Putin in their conversations. The US president is ready to interrupt whenever the Russian leader makes an argument he deems unfocused.
“No, that’s not what we’re talking about,” a government official recounted how Biden interrupted Putin during the exchange. “Or ‘No, it wasn’t like that 20-25 years ago’, when Russian presidents raised issues of the past.”
Biden’s tactics, the official said, prevented him from being sidetracked by a confusing passage in the Minsk agreement, or confused with a phrase someone uttered in the late 1990s. Biden will then look for it. How to get the conversation back with President Putin on track.
A White House aide who was present at an emergency meeting of the National Security Council in the Situation Room on February 10 said President Biden’s feelings about Putin were reflected in the way he ran the meeting. The White House assessed the risk that a Russian military operation would almost certainly occur.
“President Biden made it clear that he believes the Russian president will launch the campaign,” the aide said. “The judgment was made by him from the experience of someone who knows and understands Mr Putin.”
From that point of view, the President of the United States began to formulate a strategy to deal with a crisis that would erupt into conflict. He understands that it will be difficult to maintain the current level of solidarity, both within the United States and among Western countries, if it continues like that after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Republicans have expressed admiration for President Putin, especially as he is facing President Barack Obama.
“Putin wants to divide us. We must unite. It is important that we send a message around the world,” the White House said at the time.
To maintain bipartisan support, President Biden spoke privately with the four congressional leaders last month. He also surprised the bipartisan delegation to the Munich Security Conference in Germany by calling to thank them for their support.
During the call, Vice President Kamala Harris held her phone to the microphone so lawmakers could hear what Biden had to say in the Oval Office.
As a result, most Republicans, including Trump supporters, did not continue to attack Biden but focused on confronting Russia, although Democrats and Republicans still have a lot of disagreements. .
“This could be the most exciting period of Joe Biden’s presidency, being a ‘partisan wartime’ president,” said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist. “This is Joe Biden as he is, former member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, building relationships and bringing people together.”
Thanh Tam (Based on CNN, CNBC)
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