Biden leaves US to meet allies, Putin
Joe Biden yesterday departed Washington on the first foreign trip of his presidency, launching an intense series of summits with G7, European and Nato partners before a tense face-to-face with Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Biden, 78, heads from the White House first to Britain ahead of a G7 summit in a Cornish seaside resort from Friday to Sunday.
From there, in rapid succession, the veteran Democrat will visit Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle, fly to Brussels for summits with the Nato military alliance and European Union, then finish up in Geneva, where he meets Putin next Wednesday.
With the world still crawling out from under the wreckage of Covid-19, Biden is casting his diplomatic marathon as a return to badly needed US leadership.
But beyond the immediate challenges of boosting vaccine donations to poorer regions and reinvigorating post-pandemic economies, Biden's agenda features the even bigger task of shoring up a somewhat-tattered group of democracies against Russia and China.
"This is a defining question of our time," Biden wrote in The Washington Post ahead of his trip.
Biden's pitch marks a return to a traditional US worldview after four years during which Donald Trump flirted with autocrats and recast multilateralism as a dirty word.
Trump argued that the United States can't afford to be the world's policeman, an isolationist stance popular with his voters. The Biden administration has performed another 180-degree turn, declaring "America is back."
According to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the alternative is China taking over or even "chaos."
Still reeling from Trump shock, European partners may eye Biden's vows with skepticism.
There was friction last month when Washington blocked French attempts at the United Nations to demand a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Biden's ramping up of vaccine donations around the world also follows what critics saw as a long period of hoarding.
Expectations for the Putin summit are so low that simply making US-Russian relations "more stable" would be considered a success, Blinken and other White House officials say.
The White House sees the extension of the New START nuclear arms treaty in February as an example of where business can be done. Biden also needs the Kremlin to make progress with Iran, which is close to Russia.
The list of tensions, however, is far longer.
Biden blames Russia for the massive SolarWinds cyber-attack, election interference, and at the very least harboring criminals behind ransomware attacks.
Biden will also press Putin about Ukraine, Alexei Navalny, and his support for Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarussian strongman.
It's a long to-do list for the US president on his first foreign trip. But Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that Biden "has been getting ready for 50 years," she said.
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