Pollak: Joe Biden Got Nothing in Geneva Summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin
Joel B. Pollak 16 Jun 2021
President Joe Biden gave Russian President Vladimir Putin almost everything he could have wanted at their Geneva summit. He elevated Putin above other leaders, including American allies; and failed to force any real concessions on Russian policy.
The degree to which the summit was a disaster became evident when Putin emerged for his press conference — alone with a forum all to himself.
The Biden team did not want to appear with Putin at a joint conference after the meeting– both because Biden would look frail next to Putin, and because of the media dogma that President Donald Trump had somehow done something terrible by behaving cordially when appearing alongside Putin in Helsinki, Finland, in 2018.
Putin fielded softball questions from Russian news agencies, but he also welcomed hostile questions from the U.S. media. (In fact, Putin, an enemy of press freedom, was more polite than Biden would be, and took far tougher questions.)
The opportunity to defend his own position, and to attack the United States, without fear of contradiction was a massive gift to the Russian president. He used the old Soviet tactic of pointing to American problems as a way of deflecting from questions about human rights and political opposition.
He did so without fear of contradiction: when he cited the Black Lives Matter movement as an example of human rights abuses in the U.S., he knew no American journalist would object.
Biden tried to use his own press conference to make all kinds of claims about tough talk to the Russian president during their two-hour meeting. (Biden claimed, falsely, that a meeting of that length was unprecedented between two heads of state: in fact, Trump met with Putin for two hours in 2017.)
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https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2021/06/16/pollak-joe-biden-got-nothing-in-geneva-summit-with-russia-vladimir-putin/
