Biden, Putin should save their breath now

The last time Geneva served as the venue for a US-Russia summit — in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev, still fresh in his role as Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party, met with Ronald Reagan — the US president remarked that “people didn’t get into trouble when they talked to each other but rather when they talked about each other.” That’s a good explanation — though not the only one — for why this week’s Geneva summit, to take place between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin on June 16, cannot and will not succeed even by the low standards that observers have set for it. Indeed, the White House line that Biden needs to meet with Putin because of his personalised decision-making style makes little sense: Their relationship is one that personal contact can only make worse.
Biden and Putin have only had one long one-on-one meeting, on March 10, 2011. It was a flop. Biden described it in some detail in his 2017 book, “Promise Me, Dad.” The then-vice president had flown to Moscow to persuade Putin that a planned expansion of the US anti-missile defense system to eastern Europe was not a hostile move against Russia. Putin made his disbelief plain and baited Biden when the conversation touched upon Russia’s annexation of parts of Georgia. Biden said he was regularly on the phone with Georgia’s then-president, Mikheil Saakashvili, to urge him to refrain from provocative action. “We know exactly what you say to Mr Saakashvili on the phone,” Putin replied.
The conversation ended with then-Prime Minister Putin inviting Biden to admire the splendor of his office and Biden responded, “It’s amazing what capitalism will do, isn’t it?” The barb likely missed the mark: Putin had never positioned himself as an enemy of capitalism, and top officials’ offices were just as opulent under the Communists. So Biden, perhaps upset by the failure of his mission, took a parting shot with a riff on George W. Bush’s 2001 claim to have looked Putin in the eye and gotten “a sense of his soul”:
“Mr Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes,” I told him, smiling. “I don’t think you have a soul.” He looked at me for a second and smiled back. “We understand each other,” he said. And we did. Biden, in other words, didn’t care if he insulted Putin. Putin replied with what could only be interpreted as a declaration of hostility. Since that glacial moment, the two men have talked more about than to one another. Biden has occasionally repeated his claim regarding Putin’s soul, or absence thereof, and more recently added that he considered Putin a “killer” and threatened to make him pay for allegedly interfering in
US elections. ‘He who said it did it,” Putin retorted, adding that the US had no alternative but to deal with Russia on Russia’s terms.
Personal chemistry is not everything in leaders’ relations, of course. Putin appeared to like Donald Trump, and their one big meeting in Helsinki in 2018 failed to achieve anything, anyway. But Putin and Biden’s transparent mutual dislike would have hindered progress even if progress were written into their briefing memos. Biden’s idea of political professionalism has a lot to do with likability and the gift of gab; Putin’s is all about cold calculation. Biden brings to the table his Cold War era stereotypes of the KGB and Soviet communists; Putin, 10 years his junior, his post-Cold War grievances. In this personality clash, there’s no room for the kind of personal trust that breaks an impasse, the kind that developed between Gorbachev and Reagan or, at least for a time, between Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.

—Bloomberg