A decade later, then-Vice President Joe Biden had his own tete-a-tete with Putin
In June 2001, President George W. Bush was trying to size up Russian President Vladimir Putin during their first face-to-face meeting at a summit in Slovenia.
“I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy,” Bush told reporters at a joint news conference, in what turned out to be an embarrassing misconception. “I was able to get a sense of his soul.”
A decade later, then-Vice President Joe Biden had his own tete-a-tete with Putin, and he offered a starkly different assessment of the Russian strongman. As Putin was showing Biden his Kremlin office, the two men also found themselves eye to eye.
“I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a
soul,” Biden recalled in an interview with Evan Osnos, whose biography of Biden was published in October. “And he looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.’ ”
As Biden’s story about Putin illustrates, the president-elect already knows many of the players on the world stage — and knows them well, whether from his two terms as vice president or his 30-plus years in the Senate.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden shakes hands with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in Moscow, Russia on March 10, 2011.
In fact, Biden will enter the White House with more foreign policy experience than any of his four immediate predecessors, from Donald Trump to Bill Clinton, stretching back nearly three decades.
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“Biden is in a position to hit the ground running,” said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and now a distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And that’s very important, because there’s a lot of ground to make up.”
Indeed, while Biden will begin his term confronting two urgent domestic crises — the spiraling COVID outbreak and its economic consequences — many observers believe he will also put foreign policy front-and-center.
“Biden will be a foreign policy president,” predicted Bill Richardson, a former congressman and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. “That’s his first love.”
But it’s not just about wonky foreign policy passion.
Biden has made it clear that he wants to restore America’s standing in the world because he sees that effort as inextricably linked to solving the pandemic and the sputtering U.S. economy, said Damon Wilson, executive vice president of the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan foreign policy think tank. For example, Biden wants to rejoin the World Health Organization in part because he believes it will help the U.S. with its domestic COVID crisis, increasing American influence inside the organization and making the U.S. a bigger player in the global response.
“The solutions to these domestic priorities absolutely have a through line to your foreign policy,” said Wilson. “I think (Biden’s team) have baked in this fundamental connection between the domestic and the international, so that they are mutually reinforcing … It’s not like you have to choose one or the other.”
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