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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsLiberal Media? CNN: Why a Putin summit would be a huge risk for Biden
You know what would be a bigger risk? No negotiations.
CNN: Why a Putin summit would be a huge risk for Biden.
(CNN) By agreeing in principle to a summit with Russia's Vladimir Putin, President Joe Biden is reaching for a signature foreign policy win, but accepting massive political and strategic risks that could easily backfire.
Biden's last-ditch, still-tentative and highly conditioned agreement to meet the Russian President came after a weekend of frenzied diplomacy and alarming new US claims that Russia was about to invade Ukraine.
There are real doubts that the meeting, brokered by French President Emmanuel Macron, will ever take place. The White House said Sunday it will go ahead only "if an invasion hasn't happened." White House says Biden has agreed to meet with Putin 'in principle' as long as Russia does not invade Ukraine
Any summit is contingent on the outcome of talks between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Europe this week. That meeting also depends on the condition that Moscow's troops don't further encroach into Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-russia-joe-biden-vladimir-putin-ukraine-politics-diplomacy/index.html
OnDoutside
(19,953 posts)it does provide an off ramp. It would provide a way of him saving face, and maybe more if the West makes a further misstep.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Putin's reportedly depending on China to keep Russia's economy from tanking, but China has its own economic issues, and what support is given is liable to come with costs of its own. As for helping him find a way out, saving democracy in Ukraine would justify significant investment from western nations.
OnDoutside
(19,953 posts)it's that it may be the kick in the backside that they've been needing for a decade, especially the US need to keep the pressure on Germany above all....Uber alles ?
You could see China wanting Russia to run blocking for their own "adventures" in Asia and Africa.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)or rather that the choice was measured and deliberate to not react more strongly to ones we did have. (tRump disaster aside.) A handicap this definitive action by democracies is that most people will strongly resist going to war to protect people in other nations. W didn't get broad support for the invasion of Iraq to protect Iraqis from oppression or to help establish a democracy.
Oh, yes for that last. How long, though, before their common interest in promoting authoritarian government over democracies is "blocked" by conflicts of building their respective empires? China should want/need Russia's decline to continue.
doc03
(35,325 posts)the US. If Russia carries out their war Democrats will be
slaughtered in November. Gas prices and general inflation!
msongs
(67,395 posts)maxsolomon
(33,310 posts)anything he "gives" to Putin, like assurances that Ukraine will not get an anti-missile station as Poland and Romania have, would be spun as appeasement by the Right.
he could agree to keep using the ISS and that would be called appeasement.