At first blush, President Joe Biden’s joint press conference today with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto might’ve seemed largely unremarkable. Many U.S. leaders have participated in similar events, here and abroad, alongside foreign heads of state, and Biden conducted himself the way we’d expect any American president to act while representing us on the international stage.
But there was a relevant context to the event that added additional significance that might not have been obvious at first glance. Politico reported:
In the same Finnish presidential palace where Donald Trump five years ago infamously sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s denial that Russia had interfered in a U.S. election, President Joe Biden today sent Moscow a very different message.
Reasonable political observers can argue about which of Trump’s low points was the most offensive, but his 2018 summit with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki — which was held exactly five years ago this week — stood out as especially indefensible.
As regular readers might recall, after a private meeting with the autocratic leader, in which the American president took interpreters’ notes for reasons that were never explained, the Republican held a disastrous press conference in which Trump defended an American adversary, took cheap shots at his own country, and sided with Putin over the judgment of U.S. intelligence professionals.
Soon after, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence officials “were unanimous in saying that they and their colleagues were aghast at how Mr. Trump had handled himself with Mr. Putin.” One official summarized a consensus view, concluding that it was clear whose side Trump was on, and “it isn’t ours.”
In the aftermath of the event, Axios spoke to one of Trump’s own former National Security Council officials who described the situation as “a total [effing] disgrace,” adding, “The president has lost his mind.”
That was in mid-July 2018. Five years to the week later, however, the Republican’s successor didn’t just answer reporters’ questions in the same country, Biden stood in the exact same room where Trump debased himself.
What’s more, while the former American leader defended Putin’s credibility at the Finnish presidential palace, the current American leader pushed a very different line that will likely be far less popular with the Kremlin.
“Putin’s already lost the war,” Biden declared. “There is no possibility of him winning. … I think that there is going to be a circumstance where eventually, President Putin is going to decide it’s not in the interest of Russia — economically, politically or otherwise — to continue this war.”
I don’t imagine anyone in U.S. national security circles will have any questions today as to whose side the Democrat is on.
