(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



President Biden Put Putin in His Place: Boosting Biden Day 54 [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-03-14  

One of many changes we can celebrate since January 2021: We went from a president with a super-unhealthy love for Putin to one who has put him in his place.

Writing about Biden’s meeting with Putin in June of that year, Max Boot summed it up in the Washington Post: Biden wiped the smirk off Putin’s face

At Helsinki in July 2018, then-President Trump simpered and cowered. In a low point of a presidency with more low points than Death Valley, Trump accepted at face value Putin’s “extremely strong and powerful” denials of complicity in the 2016 election attack. Putin emerged from that meeting smirking like the cat that swallowed the canary. As the historian Michael Beschloss noted, there was no such grin on Putin’s lips when he did his solo press conference after meeting with Biden on Wednesday. While Putin engaged in his usual dishonesty and whataboutism — he compared his jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with the prosecution of the Capitol rioters — his manner was subdued and far from triumphant. He attacked the United States but was careful not to insult Biden personally. He even compared the current president favorably to his predecessor: “President Biden is an experienced statesman. He is very different from President Trump.” (Ouch. That’s got to sting for Putin’s biggest fanboy in the United States.)

This comes from many years of experience in foreign policy, as Edward-Isaac Dovere explained for CNN a month after Russia invaded Ukraine: Biden’s strategy with Putin is decades in the making

Joe Biden always says foreign relations is about relationships, and he’s been developing the one he has with Vladimir Putin for two decades. Since the beginning of his time as President, Biden has relied on his sense of the Russian leader to guide his own response. It’s even guided the way Biden deals with Putin in their conversations, repeatedly interrupting what he and aides see as the Russian President’s strategy of going off on tangents meant to muddle and undermine. According to a dozen interviews with White House officials, members of Congress and others involved in the effort, Biden has deliberately worked with allies abroad to deny the Russian leader the one-on-one, Washington vs. Moscow dynamic that the President and his aides think Putin wants. Publicly and privately talking about the war as a fight for freedom and democracy, Biden has left other leaders to speak with Putin. He has moved just as deliberately at home to depoliticize opposition to the invasion of Ukraine so that, even among Republicans, support for Putin has been forced to the fringes so that vilifying the Russian leader has become the one major area of bipartisan agreement since Biden took office. This week Biden ratcheted up his rhetoric by calling the Russian President a “war criminal,” a “murderous dictator” and a “pure thug.”

Or, as Nahal Tosi of CNN put it: Biden disliked Putin before it was cool

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/3/14/2208945/-President-Biden-Put-Putin-in-His-Place-Boosting-Biden-Day-54?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/