Biden plays on Putin’s vanity, but he is just a bargain basement Brezhnev 

The only template for Russo-American relations is still, it seems, the Cold War. Most of the coverage of the Biden-Putin meeting in Geneva depicted their encounter through this prism. So many comparisons have been made with the personalities and anecdotes of past US-Soviet summits that there is a real danger of overlooking the single most important fact about the present relationship between the Kremlin and the White House. It is this: the United States is still a superpower. Russia is not. It is not even close.

It flatters the vanity of Vladimir Putin for Joe Biden to treat him as though he still represented one of the great powers. But Russia has long since declined far below the level of the G7. Its GDP has stagnated under Putin, whose record in office is appalling. Even before the pandemic, the Russian economy was half the size of India’s and significantly smaller than Italy’s. The Polish economy will soon be half the size of Russia’s.

After the havoc wrought by Covid, Russia is even poorer. Its authorities have lied about the number of deaths, but some estimates put the figure as high as half a million. Russian demographics are among the worst in Europe, indeed the world. The regime’s notorious corruption and excessive spending on defence have kept disposable incomes at levels well below Western norms. The advantages of a good education system inherited from the Soviet Union have been largely wasted: the high-tech boom that might have created a Silicon Valley on the Volga happened instead in Israel, where more than a million Russian Jews emigrated after 1991. 

Much of this decline is Putin’s fault. The oppressive political system he has created has had a chilling effect on the economy. Russia has no civil society to speak of. This diminishes its political weight, because in the 21st century soft power matters more than military hardware. In diplomatic terms, Russia’s allies are mostly pariahs, such as Belarus and Syria. It is true that Putin has modernised Russia’s military, including its nuclear arsenal. But this is one of his few bargaining chips in negotiations with Biden. Apart from the threat of selling military technology to rogue states — Iran being the latest example — Putin cannot compete with the United States. Unless he can revive its civilian economy, Russia is in danger of degenerating into a glorified North Korea. 

The truth is that Russia is a post-imperial country which has yet to come to terms with its new role, as Britain and France had already done half a century ago. Psychologically, Russians of Putin’s generation have never recovered from the breakup of the Soviet Union. It is as if the United States had lost its entire southern periphery, from Arizona to Texas and Florida. Putin will never rest until “lost” cities such as Kiev, Odessa and Riga are once again under Russian sovereignty, or at least hegemony. He has seized Crimea, destabilised Ukraine and Georgia, all but absorbed Belarus and launched cyberattacks on the Baltic states. From the Arctic to the Caucasus, from the Baltic to the Pacific, the Eurasian empire of the Tsars still dominates the Kremlin’s strategic thinking. In his tawdry Black Sea palace, Putin doubtless dreams of a place in history to compare with Ivan the Terrible, Peter and Catherine the Great, Lenin and Stalin. In reality, he will be remembered, if at all, as a colourless dictator who presided over catastrophic decline: a bargain basement Brezhnev.

One of the few concrete facts to emerge from the chaotic press conferences that followed the stopover in Geneva (it was hardly a summit) was that President Biden raised the fate of Alexei Navalny. Putin sounded touchy and defensive on this subject, as well he might. Biden has warned him that if Navalny dies in the penal colony where his life now hangs by a thread, Putin will suffer “devastating consequences”. If Putin is ever tempted to order his myrmidons to finish off Navalny, he (and they) will know that the US will retaliate: not just with diplomatic measures, but with sanctions that will hurt.

This is the first time since the era of Reagan and Gorbachev that a US President has made an issue of the survival of a prominent Russian dissident. Navalny is the Sakharov of our time and Putin knows that the West will not turn a blind eye to his murder. He also knows that Navalny is the first real threat to his own dictatorship. Even though the parliamentary elections due this autumn will be rigged, as all Russian elections are rigged, there is no disguising the unpopularity of the regime. If he were ever allowed to stand in a genuinely free election, Navalny would beat Putin into a fur hat. Now Biden has given notice that he will target Putin personally if Navalny is liquidated. A dead Navalny could be even more dangerous than the living one. Nobody predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it happened with terrifying speed. Last summer, Putin saved Alexander Lukashenko, his Belarusian ally, from peaceful mass protests in Minsk after rigged elections. In the — no longer unthinkable — event that such an uprising of people power were to take place in Moscow, who would save Vladimir Putin?

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.