How Joe Biden’s cold war experience will shape
his approach to Russia
President-elect’s formative years of going toe-to-toe
with the USSR on arms control hint at how he may deal with Putin
Andrew Roth
Andrew Roth
in Moscow
Tue 29 Dec
2020 05.00 GMT
It was
1988, near the end of the cold war, when then-senator Joe Biden made yet
another visit to the Soviet Union for talks on arms control. By that time, he
felt comfortable enough in Moscow to bring a guest into the room: his teenage
son.
“Would you
mind my son, Hunter Biden, sitting in and listening? The gentleman is
interested in international affairs and diplomacy,” he said, according to
Victor Prokofiev, the Soviet foreign ministry interpreter at the meeting.
A
photograph from the meeting shows Biden’s son seated at the head of the table
as his father and Andrei Gromyko, the chairman of the presidium of the Supreme
Soviet of the USSR, discussed ratifying the international nuclear forces
treaty.
“That was
extremely unusual,” Prokofiev said. “It was particularly striking to me as a
Soviet person.”
When he
enters the White House next month, Joe Biden will bring nearly half a century
of foreign policy experience with him, making him one of the most seasoned
envoys ever elected president. “Joe knew the Soviet Union, knows Russia, has
experience with [Vladimir] Putin, and understands what’s possible and what’s
probably not,” said former senator Bill Bradley, who visited Moscow with him in
1979.
Boasting of
those credentials, Biden for a time recalled sitting briefly across from Leonid
Brezhnev in the Kremlin in 1979 before negotiations with Alexei Kosygin, the
Soviet premier. “Brezhnev looked grey; we didn’t know it but he was already
sick and dying. The Soviet president excused himself after introductions and
turned the meeting over to Kosygin,” Biden wrote in a 2007 memoir. He repeated
the story to Putin four years later.
But Andrei
Kozovoi, a historian at the University of Lille and author of a forthcoming
biography of the Soviet leader, noted in a detailed look at the delegation that
Brezhnev never mentions meeting those US senators in his diaries. Nor does his
secretary, or anyone else on the trip.
“Brezhnev
was in no meeting that I was in and I was in all the delegation meetings on
that trip,” said Bradley. Former senator Carl Levin also confirmed that
Brezhnev was not there. Biden’s transition team did not respond to a request
for comment.
Biden has
faced scrutiny before over claims about his foreign adventures. During the
Democratic primary race earlier this year, he repeatedly asserted that he was
arrested in apartheid South Africa while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in
prison. US newspapers investigated and debunked the story and Biden eventually
acknowledged: “I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I
wanted to go.”
Brezhnev’s
cameo in his memoirs lends a young Biden gravitas. But at the time, said
Kozovoi, Biden was just “one tiny little cog in the Carter ‘detente machine’”,
sent to Moscow to help allay domestic concerns about the Salt II treaty. Few
Soviet officials mention the president-elect in their memoirs, and Soviet press
clippings curtly note the senators arrivals in Leningrad and Moscow. Bradley
recalled the meeting with Kosygin, which lasted three hours, as substantive,
and said the delegates also met with foreign ministry officials and had lunch
with a senior military official.
But in
those early trips, Biden cultivated a pugnacious style in his meetings with
Soviet leaders that became his hallmark. If Donald Trump came to Moscow chasing
real estate deals and Bernie Sanders sought to join the peoples of Burlington
and Yaroslavl, then Biden’s formative years here were the decades he spent
showing he could go toe-to-toe with Kremlin officials on arms control.
It is a
role he’ll reprise next month with Putin as the new strategic arms reduction
treaty, a deal he helped move through the Senate as vice-president in 2010, is
set to expire.
“I’m from
Delaware and we have a saying – you can’t shit a shitter,” Biden told Kosygin
in 1979, Levin recalled. Asked how it had sounded in Russian, an interpreter
said: “You can’t fool a comrade.” Biden apparently liked the phrase to repeat
it nearly verbatim – “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter” – during his next trip
in 1984.
But he is
remembered in Russia as a proponent of detente who sought to bridge the gap
between Moscow and Washington even as relations collapsed in the early 1980s.
Pessimists say the mutual distrust now may be worse.
“If we had
the Biden of the 1970s and 80s [in the White House], people would not be
worried,” said Sergey Karaganov, a prominent foreign policy expert who said he
had played a minor role in organising trips attended by Biden in the 1980s.
He recalled
the impression Biden made then: “American, good-looking, establishmentarian
left-of-centre”.
Biden’s
appeal is immediately visible in a 1979 television interview that went viral in
Russia after his reelection. “I think the prospects for Soviet-American
relations are good,” Biden says earnestly before jumping into shop talk on Salt
II (it ultimately failed but both sides abided by limits on the number and type
of missiles until 1986).
The Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 sent relations between the White House and the
Kremlin into a deep freeze. Biden only returned to Moscow in 1984, joining
then-senator William Cohen to bring a private message from Ronald Reagan
regarding a “new approach to arms control”.
By all
accounts, the two took their mission deadly seriously. Reagan wrote that the
two had “been to Russia and are all wrapped up in ‘arms reductions’. I suspect
that at least one of them (J.B.) doesn’t believe I’m sincere about wanting
them.” Two years later, Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev seriously discussed
eliminating all nuclear weapons during the Reykjavik summit.
Biden
returned with a delegation and his son in tow in 1988 to discuss ratification
of the international nuclear forces treaty with Gromyko, his Soviet
counterpart. The treaty had already been signed. “This was pretty much a
well-organised, pre-orchestrated and pre-engineered meeting where everyone
watches his language,” Prokofiev, the translator, said. The INF, which in
effect banned nuclear missiles that could be launched from the Soviet Union
into Europe and vice versa, is one of several key agreements that the US has
left under Trump.
Biden’s
next big visit to Moscow would not come for another 20 years, by which time
Putin had dominated Russia’s politics for a decade and even a reset of
relations had soured. The conversation had shifted since the cold war, too,
from arms control and military balance to questions about democracy promotion
and the economy.
But Bradley
said that decades of policy experience were still relevant. “Joe is not
manipulatable,” he said, recalling Trump’s meeting with Putin. “If there was a
chance for a new relationship with Russia, it really stands a better chance of
coming with Biden than with Trump.”
Sizing up
Putin in 2011, Biden recalled giving him some straight talk: “Mr Prime
Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, I don’t think you have a soul.” (In
remarks from 2001 that have aged poorly, George W Bush said he had looked into
Putin’s eyes and seen his “soul”.)
“We
understand each other,” Putin responded, according to Biden.
But he had
also told opposition leaders (and by some accounts Putin himself) that he
should not run for a third term.
Several
Russian analysts said that had crossed a red line.
“Putin remembers
personal attacks,” said Karaganov. “He will never forget that.”
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário