Verdict suspended on US-Russia summit
US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin called their summit in Geneva “positive” or at least bearing “no hostility”, with Washington framing it as a foreign policy win. But experts say it might be months before their meeting on Wednesday can be judged a success.
The meeting of more than three hours at an elegant villa on the shores of Lake Geneva wrapped up a few hours earlier than what White House officials had earlier indicated. It was followed by two solo news conferences instead of a joint one, but was capped by a joint presidential statement on strategic stability.
“I think the most important takeaways from the summit concern atmospherics and process rather than substance,” Cal Jillson, a political scientist and historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, told China Daily.
The meeting was about showing two seasoned leaders sorting through a host of issues looking for a few on which they might share enough common interests and goals to begin serious work, he said.
“Both sides have agreed to restaff their embassies and begin discussions around climate change, arms control and cybersecurity. It will be months before we know anything concrete about progress,” Jillson said.
On the tightly controlled optics of the meeting, Jillson said Biden did not want anything awkward to arise at a joint news conference and detract from the image of “serious men involved in serious talks”.
Biden called his meeting with Putin — their first face-to-face encounter since he became the US president — as “good, positive”. Of the session, Putin said it exhibited “no hostility”, but was “very efficient” and aimed at achieving results, including pushing back the frontiers of trust.
In his opening remarks, Biden said that he expected Washington and Moscow could “establish a predictable and rational way in which we disagree — two great powers”.
Putin, at his news conference after the summit, said: “The West believes that the Russian policy is unpredictable. Well, let me reciprocate. The US withdrawal from the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty in 2002 wasn’t predictable.”
He cited US military strikes in Afghanistan and the Guantanamo Bay prison as examples to counter US criticism on Russian human rights. This issue, along with cyberattacks, tops the US long list of allegations against Moscow.
The Russian leader said he did not want to see things like the Black Lives Matter movement and unrest happen in his country. He also criticized the arrest of many of those who attacked the US Capitol in Washington on Jan 6 during a protest to contest the certification of the 2020 US presidential election results by the US Congress.
“What we saw was disorder, disruption, violations of the law, et cetera,” Putin said of the protests that followed the murder of African American George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020.
Biden said afterward that any comparison between what happened on Jan 6 and the Black Lives Matter movement was “ridiculous”.
In a joint statement released after their meeting, the two heads of state noted that both sides have “demonstrated that, even in periods of tension, they are able to make progress on our shared goals of ensuring predictability in the strategic sphere, reducing the risk of armed conflicts and the threat of nuclear war”.
Stanley Renshon, a political scientist at City University of New York, also said that the fact that the leaders’ meeting was much shorter than earlier indicated, and that there were separate news conferences, suggests that the exchanges didn’t lead to any substantive or in-depth discussions.
Renshon said the common ground established at the summit would be vague generalities like calling the discussions “constructive” by Putin or hoping for a relationship that is more “predictable” and “stable” by Biden.
Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of R. Politik, a political consultancy in Russia, said what happens next is more important — “whether Russia and the US are able to set up mechanisms for dialogue to continue working on this positive agenda”.