Sparring between Washington and Moscow, a diplomatic, political and military constant since the end of WWII and start of the Cold War, is rightly back after the Trump years of weird and dangerous American subservience to Russian predations. Thank you, Joe Biden, for calling a killer a killer and, yes, thank you Vladimir Putin, for resuming your role as the heavy in the relationship.
Sparring between Washington and Moscow, a diplomatic, political and military constant since the end of WWII and start of the Cold War, is rightly back after the Trump years of weird and dangerous American subservience to Russian predations. Thank you, Joe Biden, for calling a killer a killer and, yes, thank you Vladimir Putin, for resuming your role as the heavy in the relationship.
Rivals and opponents, respectful and wary of each other, not teacher and student, as Donald Trump seemed to happily be Putin’s fawning lapdog.
Putin used his security services to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and Trump — the beneficiary — was thankful for the help as he showed with his disgraceful surrender in Helsinki in 2018, siding with Putin over U.S. intelligence agencies.
Last year, the Kremlin did it again, as U.S. intelligence has now concluded that “President Putin and the Russian state authorized and conducted influence operations against the 2020 U.S. presidential election aimed at denigrating President Biden and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the U.S.”
This time, the White House, under Biden, promises that there will be payback. As there will also be payback for the Russian-authored SolarWinds computer hack to steal data. As there has been now two rounds of sanctions for Putin’s attempted poisoning assassination of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Putin contends, with a laugh, that his men are not responsible, as they would have succeeded in offing Navalny.
So Biden calling the modern czar a killer and man without a soul is fitting, and while Putin responded at first to Biden’s cracks by pulling back his ambassador from Washington, he then proposed a video meeting and wished Biden “good health.”
And through the thrusts and parries, important cooperation continues, as Biden and Putin agreed to extend the New START Treaty controlling nuclear weapons for another five years. Likewise, we share a joint interest in seeing that the Iranian efforts to build a bomb do not succeed.
That’s something that Trump could never figure out: You don’t have to be buddies with bad guys to cut a deal. Faced with Russian challenges, from the election to Ukraine, Trump folded. Always. It was as though he wanted to play the stooge. Whether through his admiration of a swaggering tough guy or being blackmailed with damaging financial information or embarrassing very intimate personal photos or home movies, Trump could never stand up to Putin. He laid down every time.
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville concluded “Democracy in America” by writing of America and Russia that “the principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”
His prediction was remarkably accurate, as the resulting world history showed. The great rivalry of Washington and Moscow continues and America, under Biden, once again stands for freedom.
