President Joe Biden opened his press conference with the White House press corps with him in Geneva after his summit with Putin, by stating that this meeting proves that “there is no substitute … for a face-to-face dialogue between leaders. None. And President Putin and I share a unique responsibility to manage the relationship between two powerful and proud countries — a relationship that has to be stable and predictable. And we should be able to cooperate where it’s in our mutual interests.”
Biden made clear that he views the strategic stability agreement as key, and is “pleased” that they had agreed to launch a bilateral strategic stability dialogue:
“We discussed in detail the next steps our countries need to take on arms control measures — the steps we need to take to reduce the risk of unintended conflict,” he reported. “And I’m pleased that he [Putin] agreed today to launch a bilateral strategic stability dialogue — diplomatic-speak for saying, get our military experts and our diplomats together to work on a mechanism that can lead to control of new and dangerous and sophisticated weapons that are coming on the scene now, that reduce the times of response, that raise the prospects of accidental war. And we went into some detail of what those weapons systems were.”
Biden cited once again the U.S. list of issues and differences (human rights, democracy, values, Aleksey Navalny, prisoners, cybersecurity, Ukraine, Syria, Iran, etc.), but he called the tone of the talks “good, positive,” without “any strident action taken…. Where I disagreed, I stated where it was. Where he disagreed, he stated. But it was not done in a hyperbolic atmosphere. That is too much of what’s been going on,” he said. Biden reported he had listened to a significant portion of Putin’s press conference, and agreed with him that “this is about practical, straightforward, no-nonsense decisions that we have to make or not make.”
