The Biden and Putin meeting was a last relic of the Cold War – it belongs in a world that is vanishing

Back to Geneva... With the sun shining, the sparkling lake backdrop, the motorcades and the front-door greetings, the US-Russia summit meeting this week had a distinctly retro look and feel. These are occasions that everyone involved has known how to do for decades. They were a fixture of the Cold War and its demise, and it seemed that the encounter between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin represented a conscious effort to revive the genre.

You could just imagine the instructions to the leaders on both sides from their advisers: not too much bonhomie, please, or you will suggest a readiness to compromise. Observe the agreed formalities to the letter; they are there to save you from yourself and eliminate the risk of even the slightest gaffe. And, by the way, never forget the political climate and expectations back home: your domestic constituency is counting on you not to let your country down.

Not that either of the presidents at Geneva will have needed much reminding. Both are veterans of summitry, even if Biden’s experience until recently was mostly at one remove. They knew the drill, and they performed flawlessly. Many noted that Putin – unusually – turned up on time: this was his mark of reciprocity for Russia being treated as an equal, however much that equality remains notional and rests almost entirely on weaponry.

But if the form of the summit was retro, part of its purpose – at least from the US side – was revisionist. The encounter had to be the complete opposite of Donald Trump’s extraordinary tryst with Putin three years ago in Helsinki. So it was that the venue had to be anywhere but Helsinki. So it was also that Biden made a point of showing that he had come with his team – including senior diplomatic and defence staff – and would never be alone, one on one, with Putin, at least not without note-takers and translators from both sides.

And so it was that Biden opened his press conference with a steely warrior look and a sharp, almost belligerent, defence of political pluralism and human rights that would not have been out of place at a US-Soviet summit circa 1975. Putin might have vouchsafed that they had swapped words of wisdom from their mothers, but Biden’s – public – approach was all about not showing his softer side. There must be no quarter given.

The idea of this as the non-Trump summit – the summit to exorcise the very spirit of Trump’s Russia ambitions – also explained the separate press conferences. There was to be no friendly interplay, no chance for visual or verbal comparisons, no chance for the Russian to upstage the American with his quickness of wit or his mastery of the subject, and – above all – no chance for the US president inadvertently to betray his country, as Trump was deemed to have done when he said, in effect, that he believed Putin’s denials of interference in the US election over and above the accusations of his own secret services.

I leave open the question of whether Trump’s judgement in this case might have been right. But his words ensured that his attempt to improve US-Russia relations was blighted in the eyes of the Washington political and media establishment even more than it already was. The show in Geneva in June 2021 was very deliberately the summit as duel.

As so often, however, appearances were deceptive. What this intricately managed few hours did not show – and was designed not to show – was how much of Trump’s agenda remained, even if the style and the signals could not have been more different.

Did a US-Russia summit happen? Yes, it did, and in the first six months of Joe Biden’s anti-Trump presidency, despite all the anti-Russia rhetoric of his presidential campaign and his first weeks in the White House, and despite the fierce opposition of influential Cold Warrior circles in the United States. Did it result in an improvement in bilateral relations? Indeed, it did.

You did not have to be versed in Kremlinology to note Putin’s relaxed demeanour, his periodic faint smiles, and the generous time he allowed for questions at his press conference to detect a measure of satisfaction, even vindication, on his part. Or to have benefited from a White House briefing to know that Biden – an old-school politician steeped in the ways of keeping things going during the Cold War – left Geneva feeling that his mission was accomplished.

The actual decisions taken may seem minor – the classic summit tactic was deployed of delegating future work to diplomats and experts. But channels long blocked have been opened. Processes have been set in train. All right, there are trial periods of six months to a year to assess progress, but the ambassadors will be back in Washington and Moscow within days, working groups will be set up and arms control – that ancient standby of US-Russia relations when nothing else works – is back on the agenda. I wouldn’t rule out some prisoner exchanges either.

Two developments were perhaps of more interest. One is the focus on cybersecurity. This was something broached by Trump whose very mention of possible talks with Moscow on the subject prompted apoplexy in Washington. What? Talk about cyber with those inveterate hackers and purveyors of misinformation? The guys who subverted our election? Perish the thought. Except that this is exactly what Biden and Putin are setting out to do. Biden even allowed himself a glancing remark about his own country’s cyber capability at his press conference. It is clearly not the substance that dooms a policy, but who presents it, how, and where their enemies lurk.

The other subject was Ukraine – both for what was said and what was not. Biden – correctly – avoided demeaning Ukraine as a sovereign country by openly discussing its fate with Putin. He did, however, suggest that he favoured a return to the Minsk process for resolving the conflict in the Donbas, although Minsk had seemed to be written out of the official US script post-Trump.

Before the summit, Biden also pleased Moscow by rejecting advice to try to halt the Russia-Germany Nordstream-2 gas pipeline – a project fiercely opposed by Ukraine and its EU champions – and by leaving any meeting with the Ukrainian president until after the Putin summit. In other words, unlike many anti-Trumpists in Washington, Biden is not viewing Russia through the prism of Ukraine, but placing the two as far as possible in separate boxes – which is exactly what Trump had been condemned for doing.

Cyber and Ukraine have both emerged relatively recently as key to US-Russia relations. And on both, it would appear, there is a lot more continuity between Trump and Biden than might meet the eye – which should perhaps not be surprising, given that both US presidents are of a similar age and graduates of the Cold War experience. The task for Biden was to pick up policies associated with Trump, while appearing to reject his predecessor and all his works.

Politicians and diplomats of a traditional stamp might conclude from this that the conventional approach will be generally more productive than the maverick’s, even if some objectives are the same. But such a conclusion should be qualified. US hardliners were disappointed both by the fact that the Biden-Putin summit happened at all and by its relative success.

What they failed to recognise was that it also marked a return to the old ways of dealing with Moscow and that, from the US hectoring about human rights, to the Russian pretence that the two countries are equals, via the joint conceit that they share the same prime strategic concerns, this summit reflected a world that has almost gone.

With China becoming more assertive and extending its reach beyond Asia, with Europe having learned from the Trump years to rely less on Washington, and with Russia focused more on itself and its own neighbourhood, the premises on which such so-called superpower summits rest are less and less true.

In the future, Russia will become less central to US policy, as will the US to Russia. Geneva 2021 may usher in a new series of US-Russia summits, but this series will be the last, as the concept finally passes into history, along with the Cold War worldview to which it offered a sort of solution.