Meeting on the sidelines of the Artic Council summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, 58-year-old Secretary of State Tony Blinken met with 71-year-old Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Blinken’s last high-profile summit with China ended badly, with he and 44-year-old National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan slamming China Marh 18 at a get-to-know you summit in Anchorage, Alaska. Blinken and Sullivan blasted senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi for genocide against Muslim Uyghurs, cracking down in Hong Kong and intimidating Taiwan. Blinken and Sullivan couldn’t have failed worse to establish rapport with China, a vital economic and strategic partner of the U.S. Now, before Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin summit in Switzerland, Blinken hoped to set the right tone with Lavrov but instead started where he left off with China in Anchorage.
Blinken knows that former President Donald Trump had a good relationship with Putin, showing mutual respect, free of the kind of invectives that Biden and Blinken started with Russia and China. In an astonishing gaffe, Biden called Putin as “soulless killer” March 16, throwing Putin for a loop, sounding like Biden wasn’t playing with a full deck. “We seek a predictable, stable relationship with Russia,” Blinken told Lavrov. “We think that’s good for our people, good for Russian people and indeed good for the world,” Blinken said, sounding a more positive tone. But Putin and Lavrov are well aware of recent U.S. and EU sanctions against the Russian Federation for alleged meddling in U.S. elections or alleged hacking of SolarWinds network management software used by the Pentagon and other government agencies. Blinken has plenty complaints for Lavrov.
Lavrov wasn’t too happy about Biden repeating the same actions as his former boss, President Barack Obama, when he expelled 35 Russian diplomats Dec. 31, 2016, for alleged Russian meddling in U.S elections. Recent tit-for-tat expulsions by the State Department and Russian Foreign Ministry turns back the clock to Obama’s last days. What happened to the four years of good will under former President Donald Trump. All Democrats and the media did during his four years was accuse Trump of colluding with Russia, an utterly baseless charge from former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton pack-of-lies in the so-called “Steele Dossier.” Yet Blinken starts right back up with Lavrov Blinken’s dour attitude toward important U.S partners like Russia and China, digs a deep hole for U.S.-Russian relations. Blinken looks over-his-head on the world stage.
Going through a litany of complaints or veiled threats is not way to rebuild diplomatic relations with Russia and China. “It’s also no secret that we have our differences and when t comes to those differences, as President Biden has also shared with President Putin, if Russia acts aggressively against us, our partners, and our allies, we’ll respond—and President Biden has demonstrated that in both world and deed, not for purposes of escalation, not to seek out conflict, but to defend our interests. Blinken simultaneously threatens Russia, attributing it to Biden, then backtracks, saying it’s not about “escalation” or “conflict.” Where’s the attempt to get along when Blinken focuses on differences rather than finding common ground. If Blinken’s attitude is any indication of how things will go with Biden, it’s better that Biden waits until amore appropriate time to summit with Putin.
Blinken looks like a dear caught in the headlights dealing with world leaders. How many rules of diplomacy can Blinken break before he put U.S national security in jeopardy. Biden relies on Blinken to get out his message but he’s not supposed to alienate important global partners like Russia and China. “We have serious differences in the assessment of the international situation, we have serious differences in the approaches to these tasks which have to be solved for its normalization,” Lavrov said. Lavrov, a seasoned international diplomat, senses that Blinken can’t think outside the box of his pre-digested talking point, failing miserably to create rapport with his Russian counterpart. Threatening unspecified consequences if Biden thinks Russia has acted too “aggressively” doesn’t bode well for any upcoming summit, if it’s only about threats and hurling insults.
With the U.S. media rubber stamping everything Biden does, there/s zero scrutiny on how Biden has alienated Russia and China, two of the most important foreign competitors. Blinken spent too much time complaining about Russia’s military build up on near the Ukrainian border. Biden and Blinken spend too much time focusing on the negative, like the build up of Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. But what really rubbed Putin the wrong way was Biden and Blinken demanding that Putin release 44-year-old Russian dissident Alexi Naalny from a Russian penal colony. Biden and Blinken often complain Russian meddling in U.S. democracy, including elections. But when it comes to Russia, both insert themselves into Russia’s internal affairs dealing with a known revolutionary, whose clandestine organization seeks to topple Putin’s government.
