The First 100 days: Breaking with Trump
on Russia
Steven Pifer – April 26, 2021
President Joe Biden is the first
president since the Cold War to begin his term not seeking closer relations
with Russia; there will be no “reset.” He has indicated instead that he will
push back against Russian misbehavior while seeking to cooperate where doing so
advances U.S. interests. In his first 100 days Mr. Biden has sought to
distinguish his policy from that of Donald Trump, who seemed incapable of
criticizing Vladimir Putin or Russian transgressions.
The first full day of his administration
illustrated Mr. Biden’s approach. The White House said he would
extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) for five years,
essentially accepting an offer Mr. Putin had made more than a year earlier—but
something that was very much in the interest of U.S. national security. White
House officials also announced that Mr. Biden had asked for assessments of
Russian actions such as interference in the 2020 presidential election and the
Solar Winds cyber hack, promising that the administration would “hold Russia to
account for its reckless and adversarial actions.”
Mr. Biden described his policy directly
to Mr. Putin in a January 26 phone call. He discussed
New START and strategic stability but also raised issues of concern, including
Ukraine, election interference and Kremlin-opponent Alexey Navalny’s poisoning.
The White House read-out of the call (there were several important Trump-Putin
calls with no read-outs) noted that the president had also said that the United
States would “act firmly in defense of its national interests in response to
actions by Russia” that caused harm to America or its allies.
Anticipating relations with the Kremlin
that will have major adversarial elements, the Biden administration has moved
to shore up the trans-Atlantic relationship and repair the damage done during
his predecessor’s four years. In a February 19 virtual appearance at the Munich Security Conference, the
president reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to NATO and Article 5 (an attack
against one shall be considered an attack against all), stressed the importance
of collective efforts to meet the “threat from Russia,” and reached out to
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who often found herself the target of Mr.
Trump’s ire. (The Biden administration also halted, and then reversed, Mr.
Trump’s order to withdraw some 10,000 troops from Germany.
As the intelligence community completed
its assessment of election interference and other Russian actions, and with
tensions rising due to the Russian military build-up around Ukraine, the Biden
administration calibrated its response. It sanctioned a number of
Russian entities and individuals on April 15. As a warning of what could come,
the president issued an executive order authorizing sanctions for a broad range
of potential Russian misdeeds, and the Treasury Department placed limits on
purchasing Russian sovereign debt, though in a restrained manner that could
later be ratcheted up and made considerably more painful.
The president foreshadowed the coming
sanctions to Mr. Putin in an April 13 call in which he also
reiterated the U.S. commitment to support Ukraine, a commitment that the
administration has stressed publicly (if Mr. Putin was bothered by Mr. Biden’s
“killer” comment in a mid-March press interview, he apparently said nothing
during the call). In remarks to the press two days
later, Mr. Biden noted that Washington could have imposed harsher penalties,
but he had chosen proportionate measures. He added that he did not want an
escalatory cycle with Moscow but sought “a stable, predictable relationship.”
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Stable and predictable may be as good as
it can get in the near term. In both of his calls with his Russian counterpart,
Mr. Biden has raised areas—such as arms control and strategic stability—where
U.S. and Russian interests should coincide. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan have echoed these points. While
virtually all Trump political appointees were let go when Mr. Biden took
office, one notable exception was John Sullivan, the ambassador in Moscow. And
the president proposed that he and Putin meet this summer.
The Biden administration believes that,
even with U.S.-Russian relations at a post-Cold War nadir, the two countries
can do business on certain questions where they have mutual interests. In
addition to using arms control to manage their nuclear competition, the sides
presumably share an interest in blunting the nuclear ambitions of Iran and
North Korea. As U.S. and NATO military forces prepare to leave Afghanistan,
neither Washington nor Moscow has anything to gain from chaos or a return of
the Taliban to power.
The president thus has correctly laid
out the possibility of some positive engagement along with measures holding
Russia to account for misbehavior. His ability to pursue both of those tracks,
however, will depend in part on Kremlin actions.
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2018
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Arrested immediately on his return to
Moscow in January, Mr. Navalny now is in dire health in a Russian prison. His
death would spark an uproar in the West. More critically, while the menacing
Russian military movements around Ukraine likely aim just to unnerve Kyiv and,
at the same time, test Mr. Biden’s reaction (as well as that of the West more
broadly), a Russian military incursion remains a distinct possibility.
Such an attack would provoke a deep
crisis in relations between the West and Russia. Washington and its European
partners almost certainly would respond with new and more punishing sanctions.
And should that happen, a summer summit, as well as real effort to work
together on selected issues where the countries’ interests converge, could get
booted a long way down the road.
Nonresident Senior Fellow
- Foreign Policy, Center for Security, Strategy,
and Technology, Center on the United States and
Europe, Arms Control and
Non-Proliferation Initiative
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