Biden and Putin

Vladimir Putin isn't exactly losing sleep over the change of the guard in the United States after meeting with President Biden in Geneva last week, but the Russian leader at least knows this much: This President is not as malleable as his predecessor. 

President Biden made it clear to Putin that he's not taking his assurances of good behavior at face value.  He doesn't trust Putin not to hack U.S. corporate or government computer mainframes, and he's made it clear that he thinks he's a killer.  And unlike Donald Trump, who nonchalantly excused Putin's and his own country's (and his own) misdeeds ("Do you think we're so innocent?"), President Biden is holding America to a higher standard and pushing the county to embrace democratic principles at home and aboard.  In short, Putin no longer has a soul mate in the White House.  

So what does this mean for détente?  We never really had détente when Trump was in the White House.  Détente is an understanding of the need for cordial relations between adversaries; what we had in the previous administration is a bromance.  Now President Biden is setting the stage for a world in which the U.S. and Russia are not friends but countries on opposite sides of political and social ideology that must work together to solve problems like climate change, the COVID pandemic, and nuclear proliferation.  And President Biden will continue to push for Russia to answer for nasty developments like the incarceration of dissident Alexei Navalny and the annexation of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.

And having stood up to Putin, President Biden is now ready to stand up to Mitch McConnell.