This week, President Biden will hold his first meeting as president with Russian President Vladimir Putin. He’ll be the fifth American president to try to negotiate with Putin, whose hold on power matches his ambition to assert Russian prerogatives and counter the United States globally.
Although Biden’s predecessors adopted a range of postures toward Putin, none proved very effective at engaging with or containing him: Bill Clinton’s relationship with Putin was short and flat. George W. Bush saw Putin as a potential ally in the war on terror and hosted him at his Texas ranch, but critically misjudged the ex-KGB agent’s “soul.” Barack Obama opened with high hopes for a relationship “reset” with Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s handpicked caretaker president from 2008 to 2012, but when Putin seized Crimea in 2014, Obama fell back on economic sanctions that have not altered Putin’s anti-Western policies. Donald Trump was preoccupied with currying Putin’s favor, while his administration and Congress continued a tit-for-tat sanctions policy that also failed to reverse Putin’s course.
Biden has his own history with Putin, whom he has previously characterized as a killer without a soul. Yet Biden says he wants a more “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia, and with good reason: Russia’s nuclear and conventional forces remain threats to the U.S. and its allies, while Russian aggression against its neighbors, interference in American and European politics and disruptive cyberattacks have struck blows against the rules-based international order that Biden seeks to shore up.