June 18 (EIRNS)–NSA Jake Sullivan was emphatic at his Thursday on-the-record call with reporters that Biden would follow up on his summit with Vladimir Putin, with a discussion with China’s Xi Jinping. The White House transcript stated, “[T]he notion that President Biden will engage in the coming month with President Xi in some way to take stock of where we are in the relationship and to ensure that we have that kind of direct communication that we found valuable with President Putin yesterday, we’re very much committed to that. It’s now just a question of when and how.”
The bulk of his press conference was to report how successful Biden had been on his European trip, basically, that he’s taken leadership of the West with his B3W–Build Back Better World, “a new infrastructure initiative… that will be a high-standards, transparent, climate-friendly alternative to the Belt Road Initiative.” He has NATO sold on “tackling China… for the first time, truly taking the security challenge posed by China seriously… and standing up to, countering and pushing back on China’s non-market economic practices…” With no irony intended, he described how governments supervising a deal between Airbus and Boeing (with agreements on investments and tariffs) so as to curtail China’s large passenger aircraft industry, is an example of the ending of “non-market economic practices.”
Sullivan described how pulling together such a Western alliance means that one can deal with Russia as a “principled engagement” – presumably, making our values clear to the opponent while identifying areas to work together. The question was posed: After Russia, does that mean “you can go on to a bilateral discussion with President XI and how’re you taking that on”?
Sullivan then elaborated: “[W]hat the President said, about there being no substitute for leader-level dialogue as a central part of why he held the summit with Putin yesterday, also applies to China and to President Xi Jinping. He will look for opportunities to engage with President XI going forward. We don’t have any particular plans at the moment, but I would note that both leaders are likely to be at the G20 in Italy in October…[W]e will sit down to work out the right modality for the two presidents to engage.” He referred to two modalities – possibly by phone or by a side-meeting at an international meeting – and then, or “something else.” Sullivan’s briefing remarks are here.
At a follow-up press conference on Thursday with the State Department’s Ned Price, Robert Delaney, the Washington DC reporter for the South China Morning Post, referred to Sullivan’s announcement and brought up the previous roadblocks (the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the Wuhan lab and the coronavirus, and such). Price referred back to Sullivan’s explanation and then reaffirmed the “principled engagement” line.
June 18 (EIRNS) — Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov commented very positively on the Biden-Putin Summit in an interview with TASS, posted today.
“It was an active dialogue, rich in terms of contents and specifics, multi-layered. Generally, I note for myself that it was a summit meeting in every sense of this word,” Ryabkov said.
“A new start. A new beginning…Whether there will be an upward movement – the question remains open,” He continued. “But the fact that the desire not to escalate [tensions] further, but to look for ways out of deadlocks prevailed, that is a fact,” he said.
“There were no major breakthroughs, but given the state of relations, there could not have been. Nevertheless, especially in terms of the stability and security in the field of information and communications technology, they have achieved shifts in a constructive direction. As for the regional issues — it was rather an exchange of estimates and well-known views so it passed rather predictably,” the deputy minister explained.
On the proposal made at the summit for strategic stability talks Ryabkov said, “I would say that we have a chain of direct instructions from the leadership in order to avoid pauses in practical interaction with the U.S. This specifically concerns strategic stability and ICT security…,” the senior diplomat said.
“We are launching without delay and without pauses the implementation of the achieved understandings, putting their translation into practice. And we expect very much an American response,” Ryabkov stressed.
According to Ryabkov, Biden did not engage in barnstorming for U.S. allies at the summit, but dealt with bilateral concerns.
“Specifically at this meeting, I would not say that there was talk about such American intercession, similar to the one that took place a few weeks ago, when Washington suddenly became very concerned about including the Czech Republic in our list of unfriendly states. There was not anything similar at this meeting,” he said. “But it is also the fact that [U.S. President Joe] Biden came to Geneva with a whole series of joint documents the Collective West, as they say, adopted recently in different formats behind him, and it was felt. This was expected, and ultimately it is not so important whether this or that position of the United States is being worked out individually, or is shared by a number of other states. After all, it is the substantial part, which is important, and we receive it in the form of signals, some expectations or claims. We focus on the meaning, and not on the number of signatories under this or that signal”.
As for allegations against Russia made by Washington, he said they were totally groundless.
“We have no need to explain the red lines to the U.S. We have long understood what our colleagues in Washington talk about, when they use various languages of this or similar meaning. But we don’t even cross these red lines, because all their accusations that we act like we should not, are totally groundless. And this is one of the fundamental problems in relations with the U.S.,” he said.
“As for our red lines, I think President [Putin] explained it so clearly for everyone that I don’t think any further comment is necessary. And the talk about where we see the special acuteness of problems in regards to the U.S.’s behavior was quite straightforward and honest in Geneva,” the senior diplomat noted.
June 18 (EIRNS)–The National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. published on June 16 a package of interviews with all of the U.S. ambassadors to Russia since the late 1980’s, starting with Jack Matlock. EIR has yet to review the entire package but Russian President Vladimir Putin figures largely in the interviews as he’s been there for the entire period of those ambassadorships. The response of Jack Matlock, who was ambassador to the then-Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991, to a question on Putin, is of significance, given the recent British effort to mythologize the history of that period, particularly with respect to German re-unification and NATO expansion.
“I think to be fair to Putin, I would say he started out being-–hoping to be-–an ally of the United States. He was the first to call President Bush after 9/11; he offered full cooperation in our invasion of Afghanistan, including overflights, intelligence, and so on,” Matlock noted. “What did we do in exchange?”
“We withdrew from some of our most basic agreements with Russia,” Matlock went on, answering his own question. “We kept expanding NATO, something that the first President Bush had promised Gorbachev we would not do if he allowed the unification of Germany and Germany to stay in NATO. Step by step we pulled out of even our most basic agreements and then, increasingly, are surrounding Russia, right up to their borders, right up to beyond their borders of the former Soviet Union, with a military alliance which they are not in.”
Matlock was not endorsing the style of internal politics in Russia and expressed his own view that there are things he believes Putin has done that have been damaging to Russia but, he stressed, “the Russian people are entitled to choose their leadership, and though his popularity may not be quite what it used to be, it is still greater in Russia than any of our recent presidents have been in the United States. And I would suggest that, before we condemn him too much, we think about that.”