Entering a global scene shaken by an ego-driven turmoil, Biden hopes to return American diplomacy to a state of normalcy. His conversations with about half a dozen leaders this week resulted in friendly conversations after four years of tension, with more delicate topics left for later. French President Emmanuel Macron prevented his translator from speaking in English. German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered a quick invitation to visit before retiring in the fall.
Putin himself seemed to fully anticipate the attack, according to a senior government official, including Biden’s warning that new sanctions may be imminent.
Biden’s connection to Putin was kept closed before, during and after it happened, with security and preparedness measures dating back to the pre-Trump era, officials said. The president’s tough speech on a number of issues signaled that the abrupt re-adoption of long-standing American policies has fallen by the wayside over the past four years.
He also suggested a renewed emphasis on protocol in the early days of the Biden government, an extension of their joint effort to restore a sense of normalcy to the presidency.
Working from a manual
Each of Biden’s calls to world leaders this week followed the same plan, according to officials familiar with the calls that described them to CNN. Unlike his predecessor, virtually all of Biden’s calls took place in the Oval Office. Trump liked to call his colleagues in the residence’s Treaty Room, with only one or two senior assistants present, while others were sent from the Situation Room or confidential facilities.
For Biden, there were briefing binders and discussion points, calls before the call and a note taker ready. When the prescribed time came and the line was connected, an operator in the White House Situation Room connected it to the Oval Office. A red light began to flash on one of the two black phones positioned on the Resolute Table. An aide rang and announced, “Now you’re on speaker with President Biden.”
Sitting in the Oval Office with a black pen in his hand and a carefully crafted script in front of him, Biden has been calling mostly to break the ice. So far, their conversations have not relied on the playfulness and open hostility that has become a hallmark of Trump’s early connections with foreign leaders – and in the past influenced some of Biden’s own interactions with his international interlocutors.
Although Trump has restricted the number of officials authorized to hear his calls, Biden has not, said a person familiar with the process. Advisers with specific country experience or staff focused on a range of issues discussed in the call heard or received transcripts after the calls. These employees have the authority to do their jobs normally, the person told CNN.
The return to a relatively predictable way of interacting with foreign leaders is a relief for officials across the government, some of whom saw Trump’s unpredictable encounters with heads of state as a potential threat to national security.
When making calls from the west wing during the early days of his presidency, Trump used to be surrounded by political advisers like Steve Bannon. An infamous photo of his first phone call with Putin showed Bannon along with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn huddled around Trump’s crammed table of papers, folders and a glass of Diet Coke.
With Putin and most other leaders, Trump dismissed the talking points that had been planned for him by officials, preferring to let the conversation go wherever he took it. At the end of his government, he dramatically limited access to transcripts of his phone calls after the content of his July 2019 conversation with the President of Ukraine sparked his first impeachment process.
At least for now, Biden is taking a totally different approach.
“What impresses me about all the calls that President Biden received is that they are very intentional. They are made for a purpose – you understand what the objective is, you understand what the result is; it is part of a broader strategy” , Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNN.
“What the president does is tightly integrated with his team and with the intentions and strategies of the United States government,” said Alterman. “And President Trump was not a fan of that system.”
Surprises to come
This is not to say that Biden will not surprise his team with frank or sincere comments to colleagues in the future. During a long career as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and later as vice president, Biden used to make careless remarks to foreign leaders, including when he told Putin in 2011 that he did not believe the Russian leader had a soul.
Biden showed a preference for developing personal relationships with leaders rather than learning about them from a pile of instruction books. As vice president, he teased President Barack Obama – who hesitated to develop close friendships with many foreign leaders – by viewing international relations through impersonal lenses.
“You have to know the soul of the other man or woman, and who they are, and make sure they know you,” he once said to Obama.
He mistook some leaders for quotes from Irish poetry that lost their meaning when they passed through a translator. And he offered compelling assessments of American politics that were not always well received in foreign capitals, such as when he told the President of Afghanistan in 2009 that Pakistan was “50 times more important” to the United States than his country.
But, at least in his early days as president, Biden sought to instill a dose of normality in his contact with foreign leaders.
Even Biden’s conversation with Putin on Tuesday seemed to follow the rules, despite the litany of critical points between Washington and Moscow that government officials say he raised. Although the topics were decidedly hostile, the tone was professional, according to a person familiar with the call. The two men agreed to quickly resume the New START nuclear treaty, a sign of emerging diplomacy even in the midst of the conflict. They didn’t speak for long.
The call was designed “to establish some basic political views from the start,” according to a government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the conversation.
Tuesday’s call came at the request of Moscow, according to a person familiar with the matter, who said Biden wanted to meet with European leaders and his advisers before speaking by phone with Putin. The Kremlin requested a call shortly after Biden took office last week, which is standard for foreign leaders who wish to speak with the new president.
The trajectory of Biden’s call was so predetermined that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, already had a list of expected topics in hand when asked about the call during her briefing on Tuesday, although it had just been completed.
This is in sharp contrast to Trump, who often entered his calls without preparing or rushed his team through preliminary instructions. Even short lists of talking points, condensed on a topic page, were often discarded, included when Trump ignored the capitalized advice written by his advisers to “DO NOT CONGRATULATE” Putin for winning his 2018 election.
Trump also seemed “confused” about the situation in Crimea and other issues related to Russia, said an official, explaining Biden’s goal in talking to Putin as “let’s clear things up soon so there are no confused messages floating around – – not that Putin believes otherwise. ”
Putin’s phone call purposely followed a conversation on the same day between Biden and NATO’s secretary general, which the White House recorded and posted clips online. In it, Biden is seen expressing fervent support for the defense bloc, which Trump was reluctant to do because he believed other countries were not paying their fair share.
First round of calls
Biden has been talking to one or two leaders a day since last Friday, moving east around the globe mainly for friendly conversations. He and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spent little time discussing the contested Keystone XL gas pipeline, although they did not dwell on this rare area of disagreement.
Biden did not address the Trump border wall issue with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, according to readings and people familiar with the connection. Instead, the men wanted to discuss some broader issues and decided to leave the topic hot for a later date.
Some French officials wondered if Biden would break the tradition and call Macron before speaking to his British counterpart Boris Johnson, perhaps signaling solidarity with the post-Brexit European Union.
But Biden maintained the standard order, speaking first to the Prime Minister and then to Macron and Merkel, indicating a firm view on US-UK relations.
On Wednesday, Biden spoke to the Prime Minister of Japan and is expected to speak soon with the President of South Korea. It remains to be seen when he will call Xi Jinping from China, a consequent conversation that Biden’s advisers have been anticipating for several years. weeks.