How Far Will Biden Go to Stop Putin?
President joe Biden always considered the plausibility of a Russian invasion and dreaded its consequences. Not just for the human costs, but how it might harm his presidency. He could foresee how a distant conflict might reverberate at home—with skyrocketing energy prices that could slow the economic recovery and retaliatory ransomware attacks that could disrupt daily life. To stave off the worst case, he kept offering Vladimir Putin opportunities to back away, even if he didn’t put much stock in them.
Over the course of his initial conversations with Putin, he chastised the Russian leader for interfering, threatened him over ransomware attacks—and then set out to charm the man, sensing he had no other choice. Where Barack Obama once dismissed Russia as a “regional power,” Biden pointedly called it a “great power.” Rather than speaking with Putin on the sideline of a global conference, he met with him in Geneva, one-on-one, a gesture of respect meant to recall the Cold War summits of yore. I imagine Biden choking on his words—or perhaps suppressing the urge to take a swing—as he tried to initiate a productive conversation with the man whose intelligence services did whatever it could to elect Donald Trump.
