![]() alliances and partnerships put pressure on Russia and make it pay a very heavy price for its misdeeds but also structure the conflict not as one between the United States and Russia, but as between the Russian kleptocracy and oligarchy on the one hand, and the Russian people on the other, with America supporting Russia’s “underground civil society.”Įxposing Russian official corruption through leaks, while naming and shaming the perpetrators and discrediting the Kremlin in the eyes of ordinary Russians is the main tool of this approach.īesides extending the frontline of the U.S.-Russian confrontation to include democracy and human rights, Biden can also be counted on to take on Russia more boldly in the former Soviet Union, from Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova to the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Such a conclusion provides an insight into Biden’s future policy toward Russia and suggests that that policy will be to better coordinate the Russia-related activities of U.S government agencies mount a cyber offensive against Russia consolidate U.S. Eventually, Russia will come back to its senses, ditch Putin’s policies, and recognize that it cannot rebuild itself unless it engages with the West. Thus, in Biden’s view, Russia should not be cornered: one, it would make it too dangerous for the United States two, the only thing that keeps Putin in power is nationalism and anti-Americanism. There may not have been any Arab Spring-style ouster of Putin in 2011–2012, but Biden hopes that new opportunities will present themselves in the future. However, Biden is not giving up on Russia. Rather, the problem was the takeover of the Russian state by its security services. He rejects any notion that the failure of that effort was the result of NATO’s eastern enlargement: Russian paranoia, in his view, should not be condoned. Yet Biden does not believe that the attempt made at the end of the Cold War to integrate Russia into the U.S.-dominated system was a mistake. He sees an increasingly revanchist, aggressive Russia that is taking the fight beyond the former Soviet space and getting closer to China. Even though he describes Russia as a country in enormous decline, an oil-based economy and a second-rate military power, unable to compete with the West and saddled with depressive demographics and a kleptocratic regime run by KGB thugs, he sees Moscow’s policies as aimed at weakening Western countries internally undermining the unity of such institutions as NATO and the European Union and subverting the liberal world order. However, while Biden recognizes China as America’s top competitor, he calls Russia the biggest threat to the United States. vice president, he has been intimately involved in world affairs for almost a half century. senator, a longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a two-term U.S. Of course, Biden does not entirely conflate Russia with the Soviet Union. And like the Cold War itself, it must be won by the United States. Therein lies a major distinction between Biden and Obama where it comes to Russia: for Biden, the present confrontation with Moscow is a postscript to the Cold War. ![]() Senate in 1972, Biden visited Moscow in 1979, when the ill-starred SALT-2 treaty was signed, and then again nearly a decade later just after the signing of the INF agreement, which was canceled by Donald Trump last year.Ī photo taken during the latter trip of Biden with Andrei Gromyko, the patriarch of Soviet diplomacy who was then the nominal head of state of the USSR, has become a big hit on Russian social media since Nov. mission to the UN are former members of the Obama administration, Biden’s foreign policy experience goes back much further.įor the seventy-eight-year-old, the Cold War is not something he learned about from books, like Obama, but something he lived through. In terms of foreign policy, President-elect Biden is often compared in Russia to his former boss Barack Obama, but although many of the people likely to get top positions at the National Security Council, the state and defense departments, and the U.S. When Joe Biden said in 2011 that he had looked into eyes and found that he had no soul, Vladimir Putin’s response was: “We understand one another.” With Biden elected the forty-sixth president of the United States, and Putin allowed under the recent constitutional amendments to stay in the Kremlin through 2036, this promises to be one of the coldest personal relationships between the U.S.
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