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With the G7 summit kicking off, events are taking place in Cornwall, England, but all eyes are on Geneva. This is where President Biden will meet face-to-face with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week, at a time when many experts say bilateral relations are at an historic low.
“It’s a meeting in Switzerland in a neutral country. It’s a typical Cold War summit,” said Anna Zavisova, a Russian-born journalist and political analyst based in Italy. “When you’re going to meet in Switzerland, it’s because you’re enemies, not friends. It’s not a summit about cooperation. It’s a summit about how not to hurt each other too much,” she told Fox News.
“I think it’s ironic, but it might be easier because you don’t have to try to be friends.”
The two leaders will meet face to face on June 16. (AP / Photo illustration)
There is a lot of buzz and speculation about what may or may not be achieved at the June 16 meeting.
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Zavisova pointed out that the confrontations between Vladimir Putin and former President Trump failed because the two were trying to be friends and this never happened.
Speaking at a conference this week held by the US-based Center for National Interest, political analyst Andrei Sushnetsov of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) said the recent US-Russia summit was more than a failure.
“The last summit, the failed summit, which took place several years ago in Finland, was one of the biggest disasters in Russian-American relations.”
It wouldn’t be difficult to do better this time, said Sushintsov, and he believes the United States is returning to a “coherent, self-destructive foreign policy.” But the standard of achievement is very high because relationships are on such a low. Sushintsov said respect would be an important quality to be inculcated. He added that there is no trust.
The list of grievances on both sides is long. US relations with Russia are well documented in the Western press. of human rights violations, notably in the case of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and a renewed and brutal wave of repression against the opposition; to interfere in the US elections. Russia’s position is almost the opposite.
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“Most Russians see US relations as a primary source of relationship problems,” said George Pape, of the Center for the National Interest. “In their view, Washington grew too ambitious in the aftermath of the Cold War. It tried to remake Russia and remake the world according to America’s preferences, and from the Russian view this proved disastrous. It helped bring about the collapse of the Russian state during the 1990s. It led to wars destabilizing the Middle East and Central Asia.And produced a long series of punitive sanctions by the United States aimed at forcing Moscow into submission.Instead of pursuing Gorbachev’s bold vision of a common European homeland that included Russia in the vast security architecture, the United States chose to make NATO the foundation of security European Union, to bring NATO closer to the borders of Russia.
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Geneva is indeed the site of the Cold War peaks – Eisenhower, Khrushchev, Reagan and Gorbachev. But this can be interpreted in different ways. It was the place that brought opponents to the negotiating table. “It brings with it a memory associated with potentially positive things,” said post-Soviet foreign policy expert Robert Legvold. The work is done in Geneva. “When it comes to actual work on important areas of cooperation, and the identification of strategic nuclear weapons, the majority of those talks were in Geneva as well,” Legvold added.
Some of the hard-earned nuclear arms control work has run out, and New START is the last remaining pillar of the old security architecture. This is concerning when the consensus is that relationships are at an all-time low.
As George Pepe said this week, this Geneva summit will be about reducing the chances of direct confrontation that each side sees as a potentially catastrophic scenario. In a world with more than two power centers—as opposed to direct great-power rivalry in the Cold War—the international security landscape appears to contain a much more diverse map of risks.
Andrei Suchintsov said that one measure of success would be if both sides felt a common sense of responsibility for global security.
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