Expectations for the US–Russia summit in Geneva were low, and the outcomes did not exceed them. Putin’s success is immediate. The payoff for Biden will take longer to assess – and will depend on Russia’s behaviour, argue David Gordon and Nigel Gould-Davies.
Summits almost never make decisions – they merely ratify them. The work of agreeing ‘deliverables’ is done by officials in advance and signaled to the media. Only rarely are unresolved issues brought to leaders to hammer out face-to-face. The London terrorist bombings that took place during the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 produced a rare moment of real-time summit decision-making.
Nor do these carefully planned events throw up surprises. When they do, it is because leaders have gone off script, and it is always controversial. There are two stand-out examples in the US–Russia relationship, one positive and one negative: the discussions between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev about the possibility of a nuclear-free world at the 1986 Reykjavik summit that initiated the endgame of the Cold War; and Donald Trump’s public endorsement at the Helsinki summit in 2018 of Vladimir Putin’s assurances – over the assessments of his own intelligence community – about Russia’s interference in the US political process in the 2016 presidential election.
By these standards, the Biden–Putin summit on 16 June ran to type. With US–Russian relations at their lowest point since the early 1980s, a long agenda of contentious issues, and two highly experienced leaders, there were few expectations of surprise or breakthrough. The main deliverables were modest. The return of ambassadors remedies an extraordinary situation that symbolised the parlous bilateral relationship. A new ‘strategic dialogue’ means the two sides will talk more regularly. Neither side raised any expectations in advance, and the outcomes did not exceed them. Indeed, they could have been agreed with a phone call. Those few analysts who expected more from the summit did so because they thought that both leaders would want to avoid such a meagre outcome. They were wrong.
If summit agendas and outcomes are fixed, what are the variables? Summits are mostly about language and choreography. First, they are an opportunity for leaders to engage directly. As Biden noted, ‘foreign policy is a logical extension of personal relations.’ This matters most when the relationship is new, as when John Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev at a tense summit in Vienna in June 1961. Khrushchev’s conclusion that Kennedy lacked resolve emboldened him to send nuclear missiles to Cuba. But Biden and Putin are veterans who know one another. There was no chemistry to establish and little psychology to test. Second, it is through summits that leaders communicate image and messages with their own people and with the world. Summit the result of Russian pressure, not US strategy
Three points of choreography and language stand out from this summit. Firstly, the expanded session with senior officials lasted barely an hour. Since the US had expected it to last longer, this was almost certainly due to a conscious Russian decision not to engage. It signals that, for Putin, the important thing was to meet Biden rather than deal with the wider substantive agenda of issues that divide the countries.
Secondly, the decision to hold separate press conferences for the two leaders – itself a marker of low expectations – gave Putin an hour alone to set out his narratives unchallenged, including the claim that the US had supported a ‘coup d’état’ in Ukraine; that the woman killed during the 6 January insurrection of the Capitol Building had been ‘murdered’; and that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had consciously chosen to travel to Berlin for treatment, when in reality he was in a coma following his poisoning with Novichok. While it is unlikely that Putin’s performance gave any of his explanations more credibility, it will make Biden’s task of defending the summit when he returns to Washington a bit more challenging.
Thirdly, the fact that the summit was staged at all is significant. Biden proposed it to Putin at the height of Russia’s build-up of military forces on Ukraine’s border in April. It was a decision prompted by Russian pressure, rather than part of a prior strategy, and went ahead despite a number of cyber attacks originating from Russia that followed. The Biden administration did not do an effective job in explaining the purpose of the summit to the American public, but it will be spared full scrutiny given that it was wedged in among a series of more effective summits with the G7, NATO and the EU.
Delayed gratification for Biden
Putin placed a high value on the summit. It was his first overseas trip since the pandemic began, and a rare foray from his highly COVID-secure personal protocols and facilities. Much about it will satisfy him: that his coercive diplomacy helped produce it; that he limited the discussion of substantive issues; that Biden – in a pointed departure from the rhetoric of the Obama administration in which he served – acknowledged Russia as a ‘great power’; and that he was afforded extended time in the glare of global media attention setting out his sometimes invidious framing of major issues. All of this sends a message to Russian domestic audiences – elites and populace alike – that he can still secure a meeting with the US president as an equal, and play a confident role.
As for Biden, who invested some domestic political capital in the summit, his most important and specific policy message to Putin was that he would not tolerate further cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. As he noted later, ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ The key question now is whether Putin will heed this warning and if he does not – as he did not heed similar messages when Biden was vice president – what consequences will follow. For the United States, the success of the summit may be best be judged by how effective this deterrence proves to be.
