WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden spent his first trip overseas highlighting a sharp break from his disruptive predecessor, selling that the United States was once more a reliable ally with a steady hand at the wheel. European allies welcomed the pitch — and even a longtime foe acknowledged it.
But while Biden returned Wednesday night to Washington after a week across the Atlantic that was a mix of messaging and deliverables, questions remained as to whether those allies would trust that Biden truly represents a long-lasting reset or whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would curb his nation’s misbehaviors.
Biden’s mantra, which he uttered in Geneva and Brussels and on the craggy coast of Cornwall, England, was that “America was back.” It was Putin, of all people, on the trip’s final moments, who may have best defined Biden’s initial voyage overseas.
“President Biden is an experienced statesman,” Putin told reporters. “He is very different from President Trump.”
But the summit with Putin in Geneva, which shadowed the entire trip and brought it to its close, also underscored the fragility of Biden’s declarations that the global order had returned.
Though both men declared the talks constructive, Putin’s rhetoric did not change, as he refused to accept any responsibility for his nation’s election interference, cyberhacking or crackdown on domestic political opponents. At the summit’s conclusion Biden acknowledged that he could not be confident that Putin would change his behavior even with newly threatened consequences.
Biden’s multilateral summits with fellow democracies — the Group of Seven wealthy nations and NATO — were largely punctuated by sighs of relief from European leaders who had been rattled by President Donald Trump over four years. Yet there were still closed-door disagreement on just how the Western powers should deal with Russia or Biden’s declaration that an economic competition with China would define the 21st century.
“Everyone at the table understood and understands both the seriousness and the challenges that we’re up against, and the responsibility of our proud democracies to step up and deliver for the rest of the world,” Biden said Sunday in England.
As vice president and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden had trotted the globe for more than four decades before he stepped off Air Force One and onto foreign soil for the first time as commander in chief. His initial stop, after a speech to thank U.S. troops stationed in England, was for a gathering with the other G-7 leaders.
The leaders staked their claim to bringing the world out of the coronavirus pandemic and crisis, pledging more than 1 billion coronavirus vaccine doses to poorer nations, vowing to help developing countries grow while fighting climate change and backing a minimum tax on multinational firms.
At the group’s first face-to-face meeting in two years because of the pandemic, the leaders dangled promises of support for global health, green energy, infrastructure and education — all to demonstrate that international cooperation is back after the upheavals caused by the pandemic and Trump’s unpredictability. There were concerns, though, that not enough was done to combat climate change and that 1 billion doses were not nearly sufficient to meet the stated goal of ending the COVID-19 pandemic globally by the end of 2022.
The seven nations met in Cornwall and largely adhered to Biden’s hope that they rally together to declare they would be a better friend to poorer nations than authoritarian rivals such as China. A massive infrastructure plan for the developing world, meant to compete with Beijing’s efforts, was commissioned, and China was called out for human rights abuses, prompting an angry response from the Asian power.
But even then, there were strains, with Germany, Italy and the representatives for the European Union reluctant to call out China, a valuable trading partner, too harshly. And there a wariness in some European capitals that it was Biden, rather than Trump, who was the aberration to American foreign policy and that the United States could soon fall back into a transactional, largely inward-looking approach.
After Cornwall, the scene shifted to Brussels where many of the same faces met for a gathering at NATO. Biden used the moment to highlight the renewed U.S. commitment to the 30-country alliance that was formed as a bulwark to Moscow’s aggression but frequently maligned by his predecessor.
He also underscored the U.S. commitment to Article 5 of the alliance charter, which spells out that an attack — including, as of this summit, some cyberattacks — on any member is an assault on all and is to be met with a collective response. Trump had refused to commit to the pact and had threatened to pull the U.S. out of the alliance.
“Article 5 we take as a sacred obligation,” said Biden. “I want NATO to know America is there.”
When Air Force One touched back down in Washington, Biden again faced an uncertain future for his legislative agenda, the clock ticking on a deadline to land a bipartisan infrastructure deal as the president was confronted with growing intransigence from Republicans and mounting impatience from fellow Democrats. But Biden and his aides believe he accomplished what he set out to do in Europe.
The most tactile of politicians, Biden reveled in the face-to-face diplomacy, having grown frustrated with trying to negotiate with world leaders over Zoom. Even amid some disagreements, he was greeted warmly by most of his peers, other presidents and prime ministers eager to exchange awkward elbow bumps and adopt his “build back better” catchphrase.
At the end of each day, Biden would huddle with aides, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan, eagerly going over a play-by-play of the day’s meetings and preparing for the next. Aides padded his schedule with some down time to pace the 78-year-old president, though there were still a few missteps, including some verbal flubs and when he simply neglected to announce a Boeing-Airbus deal in front of the European Council.
His summit with Putin, coming three years after Trump sided with the Russian leader over U.S. intelligence agencies when those two men met in Helsinki, loomed over the trip, with the cable networks giving it Super Bowl levels of hype. Aides wanted to confront Putin early in the presidency, with some hope of reining in Moscow and reaching some stability so the administration could more squarely focus on China.
There were no fireworks in their summit near the Swiss Alps, and the nations agreed to return ambassadors to each other’s capitals and took some small steps toward strategic stability.
But while Biden was able to deliver stern warnings to Putin behind closed doors, he also extracted few promises. In the Russian president’s post-summit remarks, he engaged in classic Putin misdirection and what-about-ism to undermine any of the United States’ moral high ground.
In his own Geneva news conference, Biden stood against a postcard-perfect backdrop of a tree-lined lake, taking off his suit jacket as the sun beat down from behind, so bright that reporters had trouble looking directly at the president.
Once more, Biden declared that America was back, but he also soberly made clear that it was impossible to immediately know if any progress with Russia had, in fact, been made.
“What will change their behavior is if the rest of world reacts to them and it diminishes their standing in the world,” Biden said. “I’m not confident of anything; I’m just stating a fact.”
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Madhani reported from Geneva.
Biden, Putin discuss ambassadors, nuclear weapons and more
Presidents Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin of Russia spent more than three hours discussing issues Wednesday at their summit in Geneva. They ticked through their respective lists so quickly and in such “excruciating detail,” Biden says, that they looked at each other and thought, “OK, what next?”
The most pressing issues the leaders discussed:
AMBASSADORS
Biden and Putin agreed to return their respective ambassadors to Washington and Moscow in a bid to improve badly deteriorated diplomatic relations between their countries.
Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Antonov, left Washington in March amid a row after Biden called Putin a killer in a television interview and imposed new sanctions on Russia over its treatment of opposition figure Alexei Navalny.
John Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador to Russia, flew out of Moscow in April after public suggestions from Russian officials that he should leave to mirror Antonov’s departure.
Both ambassadors were present at Wednesday’s summit.
Putin also said the Russian foreign ministry and the U.S. State Department would begin consultations on other vexing diplomatic issues, including the closures of consulates in both countries and the employment status of Russian citizens working for U.S. missions in Russia.
A senior Biden administration official said Sullivan is likely to return to Moscow next week. A different senior administration official said both governments had begun discussing consulate and local staff issues and the hope was an agreement could be reached in the next two months.
Neither administration official was authorized to comment publicly by name and both spoke on condition of anonymity.
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CYBERSECURITY
No breakthroughs on this issue were announced, but the leaders agreed to at least talk about what has become a major source of conflict between the U.S. and Russia.
Biden said he and Putin agreed to have their experts work out an understanding about what types of critical infrastructure would be off-limits to cyberattacks. He said the U.S. presented Russia with 16 specific types of infrastructure, including energy, elections, banking and water systems, and the defense industry.
The agreement comes amid a flood of ransomware attacks against U.S. businesses and government agencies, including one in May that disrupted fuel supplies along the East Coast for nearly a week. The disruption was blamed on a criminal gang operating out of Russia, which does not extradite suspects to the U.S.
Other serious incidents include the SolarWinds intrusion discovered last year in which hackers, believed by U.S. authorities to be Russian, penetrated multiple U.S. government networks and prompted Biden to impose additional U.S. sanctions against Russia.
Biden said the U.S. and Russian governments would follow up on certain criminal cases, an apparent reference to cybercriminals operating with impunity from Russian territory.
Putin agreed there is mutual interest in the subject.
Biden also made an implicit threat against Russia, saying the U.S. has “significant cyber capability” it could use against Russia if it were to interfere with U.S. critical infrastructure.
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NUCLEAR WEAPONS
Biden and Putin instructed their diplomats to begin laying the groundwork for a new phase of arms control.
The “strategic stability dialogue” would be a series of discussions designed to set the table for a negotiation by sorting out what exactly should be negotiated. More broadly, it would aim to reduce the risk of war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.
Biden said the goal is to work with Russia on “a mechanism that can lead to control of new and dangerous and sophisticated weapons that are coming on the scene now, that reduce the time for response, that raise the prospect of accidental war.” He said this was discussed in detail.
No date was announced for the start of talks.
The basic idea is to identify and sort out the many areas of disagreement over what a future arms control treaty should address. It also would address ways to avoid unintended or accidental moves that could trigger war.
Shortly after Biden took office in January, he and Putin agreed to extend until 2026 the New START treaty that limits long-range nuclear weapons. The challenge now is to work out what a potential follow-on pact would include.
The Russians insist it include defensive weapons, such as U.S. missile defense systems. The Americans argue that it should include so-called tactical nuclear weapons, which are not covered by New START and of which the Russians have a far larger number deployed. It might also include new and emerging technologies such as hypersonic missiles and space weaponry.
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PRISONER EXCHANGE
Biden said he raised with Putin the plight of two Americans detained in Russia.
Putin had opened the door to possible discussions about a prisoner swap with the U.S. and said those conversations would continue. Biden said he would follow up, too.
The U.S. is holding two prisoners whose release Russia has sought for more than a decade, including arms trader Viktor Bout. The other is Konstantin Yaroshenko, a pilot who was extradited from Liberia in 2010 and convicted the next year of conspiracy to smuggle cocaine into the U.S.
Biden said Americans Paul Whelan and Trevor Reed are being “wrongfully imprisoned” in Russia.
Whelan, who also holds Canadian, Irish and British citizenship, was arrested in Moscow in 2018, convicted of espionage and sentenced to 16 years. Whelan says he was just visiting Moscow.
Reed was convicted of assaulting a police officer while intoxicated and sentenced to nine years. Putin, in a recent interview with NBC News, called Reed a “drunk and a troublemaker.”
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HUMAN RIGHTS
Biden said he’ll continue to air with Putin concerns about basic human rights because it is a core tenet of what the United States stands for.
Biden said he couldn’t be president of the United States and not raise human rights issues during the summit with Putin. He mentioned the internationally publicized case of jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
But Putin said Navalny got what he deserved when he was handed a stiff prison sentence. Navalny is Putin’s most ardent political foe. He was arrested in January after returning to Russia from Germany, where he’d spent five months recovering from nerve agent poisoning that he blames on the Kremlin. Russian officials deny involvement in Nalvany’s poisoning.
Navalny received a 30-month prison sentence for violating terms of a suspended sentence from a 2014 embezzlement conviction he dismissed a politically motivated.
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SYRIA
Biden pressed Putin to drop a push to close the last international humanitarian crossing into Syria, making clear the matter was of “significant importance” to the U.S.
No deal was reached to keep it open, however.
Russia is threatening to use its U.N. Security Council veto to close the aid route for millions of Syrians internally displaced by that country’s war.
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AFGHANISTAN and IRAN
Biden said Putin asked about Afghanistan and expressed a desire that peace and security be maintained there. Biden said he told Putin that a lot of that will depend on him, and that Putin indicated he was prepared to “help” on Afghanistan as well as on Iran.
Biden declined to go into further detail. Biden’s administration is mounting new efforts to get Iran to comply with the terms of a nuclear deal it had once agreed to before Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, withdrew the U.S. from the agreement the U.S. and other world powers struck with Iran in 2015.
Putin also talked about preventing a resurgence of terrorist violence in Afghanistan. Biden said it would be very much in Russia’s interest to not see that happen.
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Associated Press writers Matthew Lee, Ben Fox, Robert Burns, Jim Heintz, Ellen Knickmeyer and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.