Biden enters a global scene driven by ego-driven riots, hoping to get American diplomacy back to normal. His talks with about half a dozen leaders this week, after four years of tension, sounded heavy to friendly conversations, with more gripping topics for later. French President Emmanuel Macron prevented his translator from speaking English. German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered a quick invitation for a visit before retiring in the autumn.
According to a senior administration official, Putin himself fully predicted the onslaught, including warning Biden that new sanctions were possible.
According to officials, Biden’s call with Putin was tied up before, during and after it happened, with security and preparation measures. The president’s difficult talks on a number of issues have indicated that the sudden re-adoption of long-standing US policy has fallen by the wayside over the past four years.
It also alluded to a renewed emphasis on protocol in the early days of the Biden government, an extension of its joint effort to restore a sense of normality in the presidency.
Work from a playbook
According to officials familiar with the calls they described to CNN, each of Biden’s calls to world leaders this week reached the same plan. Unlike its predecessor, virtually all of Biden’s calls took place in the Oval Office. Trump wanted to call his peers from the Residence Room of the Residence, with only one or two senior assistants present, while others were loaded from the Situation Room or sensitive facilities.
For Biden, there were letters and discussion points, calls before the call, and a recorder ready. When the prescribed hour arrived and the line was connected, an operator in the situation room in the White House patched it to the oval office. A red light starts flashing on one of the two black phones standing on the Resolute Desk. A helper tapped on it and announced: ‘You are now on speakerphone with President Biden. ‘
As he sat in the Oval Office with a black pen in hand and a carefully crafted writing in front of him, Biden mostly called to just break the ice. His talks so far have lacked the voluntary chatter and open hostility that have become a feature of Trump’s early calls with foreign leaders – and in the past have colored some of Biden’s own interactions with his international interlocutors.
While Trump limited the number of officials allowed to listen to his phone calls, Biden did not say. Auxiliary staff with specific expertise in the countries or officials focused on an issue discussed during the call listened to in the call, or after the calls were transcribed. The officials are authorized to perform their duties as usual, the person told CNN.
The return to a relatively predictable way of interacting with foreign leaders is a relief to government officials, some of whom saw Trump’s unpredictable encounters with heads of state as a potential threat to national security.
When he made calls during the early days of his presidency of the West Wing, Trump was often surrounded by political advisers like Steve Bannon. A now infamous photo of his first phone call with Putin showed that Bannon, along with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Vice President Mike Pence, Press Secretary Sean Spicer and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, crowded around Trump’s desk, littered with papers and folders and a glass of Diet Coke.
Together with Putin and most of the other leaders, Trump threw away the discussion points planned for him by officials and instead chose to let the conversation go wherever it happened. At the end of his government, he sharply restricted access to transcripts of his phone calls, after the content of his conversation in July 2019 with the President of Ukraine led to his first indictment.
At least Biden follows a very different approach.
“What strikes me about all the calls President Biden has made is that it is very deliberate. It is done for a purpose – you understand what the purpose 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 is doing is tightly integrated into his team and with the intentions and strategies of the U.S. government,” Alterman said. “And President Trump was not a supporter of that system.”
Surprises to come
This is not to say that Biden will not surprise his team with candid or candid remarks towards peers. During his long career as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and later as vice-president, Biden often made unguarded remarks to foreign leaders, including when he told Putin in 2011 that he did not believe the Russian leader had a soul has not.
Biden has shown a preference for developing personal relationships with leaders rather than learning them from a stack of information books. As vice president, he teased President Barack Obama – who was reluctant to develop close friendships with many foreign leaders – because he viewed international relations through an impersonal lens.
“You need to get 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 tampered with some leaders with references from Irish poetry who had lost their meaning by a translator. And he offered blunt reviews about US policies that were not always well received in foreign capitals, such as when he told Afghanistan’s president in 2009 that Pakistan was ’50 times more important ‘to the United States than his country.
But at least in his opening days as president, Biden sought to instill a dose of normality in his outreach to foreign leaders.
Even Biden’s conversation with Putin on Tuesday seems according to the book, despite the gap of jams between Washington and Moscow that, according to administrative officials, he raised. Although the topics were certainly unfriendly, the tone was matter-of-fact, according to one person familiar with the call. The two men agreed to quickly re-draft the New START Treaty, a sign of emerging diplomacy even in the midst of the dispute. They did not talk for very long.
According to an administration official, the call was designed to “establish early basic policy views, which expressed the condition of anonymity to describe the conversation.
According to a person familiar with the matter, on Tuesday at Moscow’s request, Biden said he wanted to consult with leaders in Europe and his advisers before calling Putin. The Kremlin made the call shortly after Biden took office last week, which is standard for foreign leaders hoping to speak to the new president.
The course of Biden’s call was so pre-determined that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, already had a list of expected topics on hand during her briefing, although it had just been completed.
This is in stark contrast to Trump, who frequently entered his calls because he did not prepare his team or rush through preliminary briefings. Even abbreviated lists of discussion points, summarized as one-page bullet points, were frequently discarded. This was included when Trump ignored advice written by his advisers to “DO NOT WIN HAPPINESS” with the fact that he won his 2018 election.
Trump also seemed ‘confused’ about the status of Crimea and other issues related to Russia, one official said, declaring Biden’s goal to talk to Putin as ‘let’s clear things up early so that there are no mixed messages floating around’. not – – not that Putin believes otherwise. ‘
Putin’s call deliberately follows a conversation the same day between Biden and the NATO secretary general, who recorded the White House and posted excerpts online. It shows Biden expressing ardent support for the defense bloc, which Trump was reluctant to do because he believed other countries were not paying their fair share.
First call round
Biden has been talking to one or two leaders a day since last Friday, moving eastward around the world for mostly friendly talks. He and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wasted little time discussing the disputed Keystone XL pipeline, but did not dwell on the rare area of disagreement.
According to lectures and people familiar with the call, Biden did not break the topic of Trump’s border wall with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Instead, the men wanted to discuss broader issues and decided to save the quick test topic for a later date.
Some French officials have asked them if Biden would break with tradition and call Macron before talking to his British counterpart, Boris Johnson, who would possibly show solidarity with the European Union after Brexit.
But Biden rather stuck to the standard order and spoke first to the prime minister and then to Macron and Merkel, indicating a firm view on US-UK relations.
On Wednesday, Biden spoke with the Japanese prime minister and he is expected to speak to the president of South Korea soon. It remains to be seen when he will call Xi Jinping of China, a consequent conversation that Biden assistants have been predicting for several weeks.