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- Joe Biden is meeting Russia's Vladimir Putin for a summit in Geneva on Wednesday.
- Biden and his team have taken steps to avoid traps Putin likes to set to gain advantage.
- Putin has psyched out other leaders by showing up late, embarrassing them, and exploiting divisions.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
President Joe Biden is holding his first summit with Russia's President Vladimir Putin Wednesday - and has taken careful steps to avoid the traps the Russian leader likes to set.
Putin has developed techniques over his years power in Russia to put rival world leaders on the back foot at summits like Wednesday's.
"From his timing to his baiting techniques and his postgame spin, Russia's president commands an array of tactics aimed at putting U.S. leaders on the defensive and in response mode - and has decades of experience fine-tuning them," Glen Johnson, a former senior aid to Secretary of State John Kerry, wrote in Axios.
One of the tricks deployed by Putin is to keep his counterparts waiting, sending a message that it is he who is setting the agenda.
Putin kept Donald Trump waiting for 1 hour ahead of their summit in Helsinki in 2018, and President Barack Obama was made to wait for 40 minutes before meeting Putin in 2012. Even the Pope got the same treatment.
Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia between 2012 and 2014, in a tweet said that he had seen the schedule the parties had agreed on for the summit and that Biden would arrive first, and Putin second.
"If Putin is late tomorrow, Biden won't be standing around awkwardly waiting," he wrote, notching it as a win for Biden's team.
-Michael McFaul (@McFaul) June 15, 2021
When they sit down for face-to-face talks in the Villa la Grange, Biden will be joined by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Putin by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who will be taking notes.
Trump famously held his discussions with Putin joined only by an interpreter, with their notes afterwards concealed. The subjects the leaders discussed then became a matter of enduring speculation.
Biden will be seeking to raise a series of thorny issues, such as Russian cyber attacks and human rights abuses.
Putin has a reputation for responding to challenges by airing grievances and deflecting criticism with barbs of his own, a technique on display in his NBC interview ahead of the summit.
Jon Finer, former chief of staff at the State Department, told NPR in 2017 that it was important not to "take the bait."
"Focus, absorb and then try to pivot and focus on your own agenda so you can actually get something out of these meetings," he said.
McFaul noted that there was no joint press conference scheduled, meaning that Putin would be unable to repeat the propaganda win from his conference with Trump in Helsinki.
At that summit Trump ended up siding with Putin against his own intelligence community on the issue of Russian election interference, sparking an enormous domestic problem for Trump as he publically wrestled with his own spies.
Trump also expressed support for extraditing Americans to Russia for interrogation, among them McFaul.
"Helsinki will go down in history as the worst bilateral meeting between Russians and Americans ever," McFaul told NPR.
And after the summit, there was a fresh challenge for Biden, warned Johnson.
Whereas Biden would likely take time to consult Blinken and national security officials about what to say about the outcome of the summit, Putin goes through no such consultation process.
This allows him to quickly communicate his spin on the outcome to the press in the hope of cementing Russia's preferred narrative before the other party can speak.
"Biden could be left playing catch-up unless he can beat Putin at his own game," Johnson remarked.
Despite the abject state of Russian-US relations, McFaul in his NPR interview expressed cautious optimism that Biden could make concrete progress in the meeting, singling out climate change, humanitarian assistance to Syria, and the Iran nuclear deal as areas where discussions might be fruitful.
from Business Insider https://ift.tt/3pYCViQ
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