Biden's strategy with Putin is decades in the making
...
Biden warned that Putin had dreams of rebuilding an authoritarian empire going all the way back to his days as a senator from Delaware. On the campaign trail, he said repeatedly that he knew Putin didn't want him to win.
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....
"What Putin is trying to do is surround and encircle Kyiv," said Rep.
Greg Meeks, a Democrat who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee. "What Biden is trying to do is have the whole world surround
Putin."
Part of the lesson Biden took from being involved as vice president
during Putin's 2014 invasion of Crimea was that NATO nations would need a
much faster, more humiliating and more cohesive response than the
months of infighting that produced sanctions so weak that Putin rode
them out. Yet administration officials admit privately that if Putin had
invaded Ukraine a year ago, events might have unfolded much differently
coming right off four years of former President Donald Trump's damaging
relationships and calling NATO obsolete.
Campaigning in 2020, Biden spoke about the confrontation he saw coming.
"Putin
has one overriding objective: To break NATO, to weaken the Western
alliance and to further diminish our ability to compete in the Pacific
by working out something with China," Biden told CNN's Gloria Borger at
the time. "And it's not going to happen on my watch."
Biden's
own last conversation with Putin was on February 12, more than a week
before the invasion started. And for a President and aides who on almost
everything else complain that they don't get the credit they deserve,
on Ukraine he and administration officials have ducked talk about him
being leader of the free world, despite how much of the sanctions and
international response are a result of Washington's guidance and
pressure.
The
result is Putin's being boxed in more than even Biden had expected,
along with a sustained level of attention to the war abroad and in
America that has surprised White House aides -- without rebooting a
1980s-style Cold War.
"Joe
Biden," a senior administration official said, "has known Vladimir
Putin for decades and knows exactly who he's dealing with."
Cutting off Putin began, as Biden might say, literally.
Whenever
they'd speak, Biden would interrupt Putin as the Russian President
launched into complaints that American officials see as a whataboutism
tactic designed to distract and undermine.
No,
Biden would say, that's not what we're talking about, according to one
senior administration official who has witnessed those conversations.
Or, no, that's not how things happened 20 or 25 years ago, in whichever
past grievance Putin was bringing up to justify his behavior.
"President
Putin can't use a lot of his common tricks with President Biden, like
trying to confuse people by going down long historical tangents or
meandering into the minutiae of policies because President Biden sees
those tactics coming a mile away and doesn't take the bait. He'll try to
get President Biden off topic by citing an obscure section of the Minsk
agreements or a speech someone gave in the late 1990s," a senior
administration official said, adding that Biden "is going to always
steer the conversation directly back to what he's come to talk about."
A White House aide who was in the Situation Room for a rushed National Security Council meeting on February 10 said Biden's sense of Putin was
on display throughout how he ran the conversation in which the White
House's assessment of an invasion moved from a possibility to an almost
certainty.
"He
was clear and clear eyed in that meeting that he believed that Putin
would do this," the aide said. "He spoke with the experience of somebody
who knows Putin and has dealt with Putin."
Biden thinks he wouldn't be able to keep the current levels of unity -- in the US and around the world -- if Putin sparked the kind of partisan breakdown that he did in 2014, when many top Republicans spoke admiringly of his strength and leadership largely because he was taking on Barack Obama.
Biden
hasn't -- as some in his party want -- gone after Trump, brought up the
attack on the 2016 elections or attacked Republicans for voting against
the former President's first impeachment when Trump leveraged
withholding military aid to Ukraine -- in pursuit of dirt on Biden.
...
"Putin wanted to divide us. We've been united. It's important that we send that signal to the world," the White House aide said.
...
White
House aides are tracking all the Republicans in the House and Senate
who are calling for tougher energy sanctions on Russia -- preparing to
try to undermine them as hypocrites if they complain about higher gas
prices on the campaign trail this fall. But at the same time, Biden
himself has kept up outreach to Republican lawmakers.
That's
included personally briefing all four top congressional leaders
together last month and surprising a bipartisan delegation to the Munich
Security Conference with a call to thank them for their support. During
that call, Vice President Kamala Harris held her cellphone to a
microphone so the lawmakers could hear Biden speaking from behind the
desk in the Oval Office.
Putin
has been tracking what Biden has been doing and saying about him for
years. That includes friendly Russian commentators complaining in 2009
that Biden was a "gray cardinal" secretly orchestrating a tough Obama
administration response to Putin's leadership after the then-vice
president said Russia was limping along, or a Kremlin spokesman on
Thursday saying that Biden's war criminal remark was "unacceptable and
unforgivable."
Even
as Biden has ramped up what he's been saying about Putin, there's only
so far he can go before tripping into the escalation he's so desperately
trying to avoid.
"It
hurts him to see the devastation in Ukraine, and it would be easy to
say, 'That guy's evil and we're going after him and we're going to get
him,'" Meeks said. "The question is: Is that the right thing? Because
then you're talking about World War III."