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The Biden-Putin professional wrestling match

President Biden and Russian President Putin will meet Wednesday in Geneva. Biden has a long-standing distaste for Putin, whose behavior in recent years will have made Biden even more critical. Since their last meeting in 2011, Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, had a leading opposition figure murdered just outside the Kremlin, deployed troops and aircraft to Syria to support dictator Assad with a wide array of war crimes, tried to murder an ex-Russian intelligence agent in Great Britain, tried to murder and then jailed another opposition leader on trumped-up charges, backed Belaruan autocrat Lukashenko after he engineered massive election fraud, and is now busily shutting down what remains of political opposition and civil society in Russia. That is on top of the many episodes of election interference in the US in favor of Donald Trump, Russian hacking of US government cyber systems, and Russian tolerance for cyber ransom attacks that have several times closed important American companies.

It is no surprise there will not be a joint press conference after the Putin/Biden summit. While there may be some positive news on specific issues like arms control, climate change, or the Iran nuclear deal, the atmospherics surrounding this meeting are 180 degrees opposite from President Trump’s attempted lovefest with Putin in 2018, when he said at a joint press conference that he believed Putin’s denials of election interference and not the unanimous rejected the unanimous view of American intelligence agencies.

The choreography leading up to next week’s summit has been careful, perhaps even masterful. Biden, committed to rekindling traditional American alliances, met first in Cornwall with UK Prime Minister Johnson, then rallied the G7 (that’s Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and Japan, as well as the UK and the US) to focus on China and cybersecurity, and next week he will meet first with America’s 29 NATO allies before confronting Putin. Unlike his three predecessors, Biden does not want a “reset” with Putin. He wants to confront him where needed but leave the door open to cooperation on specific issues and even improved relations overall if Putin stops his perfidies.

But Biden knows he won’t. Putin has been in many ways a successful President. Russians often give him credit for revival of their pride and their aspirations to great power status after the economically difficult Yeltsin period. His personal popularity is low at the moment, but he is committed to holding on to power by autocratic if democratic means fail. Russian parliamentary elections in September (and the presidential election in 2024) will be far from free and fair. There is not much the Americans can do about that. Even getting Alexei Navalny out of jail is more than they have managed so far.

Putin will want to use the meeting with Biden to shore up his domestic support. He can do that best by being confrontational. Biden, who has much stronger domestic support, will want to do the same thing. He will want to be seen as calling Putin out on election hacking, cybersecurity, and repression of the Russian opposition. Neither bodes well for the occasion. This summit is likely to be like “professional” wrestling: more theater than real, staged for TV and radio, but still with some possibility one or the other protagonist gets hurt.