I'm selling my white privilege card. It's over 70 years old but is in mint condition.
It has never been used, not even one time. Reason for selling is that it hasn't done a damn thing for me! No free college, no free food, no free housing, no free anything.
I actually had to go to work every day of my life while paying a boatload of taxes to carry those who chose not to work!
If you are interested, I prefer cash but would be willing to do an even trade for a Race Card which seems much more widely accepted and comes with countless benefits.
It allows you to disrespect the police and authority, resist arrest and verbally and physically assault police officers and races of people who have succeeded against and in spite of perceived and even actual racism!
Interested?
Contact me on my Non-Obama cell phone that I pay for every month…
Serious buyers only!
And:
If you want some insight into what is happening. Read Dark Agenda By David Horowitz who became a conservative after living the life of a liberal..
Critical Race Theory is Marxist. Its real target is Christianity and the Bible.
The far left wants it in our schools. The war on Christians is in full gear.
The Biden administration and the "Woke" left are embracing a radical new approach to our culture and life. It's called "Critical Race Theory."
In a nutshell it claims tpeople who are "white" and from "European" backgrounds have succeeded because of their color, and they have OPPRESSED people of color. Thus, people of color have been wronged and if they FIGHT BACK in any way then they are MORALLY right.
Make no mistake about it, the left's anti-Christian and anti-Semitic agenda is being ramped up dramatically . . . and it's frightening.
The governor of California, Gavin Newsom, actually banned private home Bible studies, while OK'ing mass BLM protests and worse . . .This is a sickening violation of religious freedom.
Horowitz claims it has nothing to do with COVID-19 and it has nothing to do with race, but it has everything to do with the power grab by the left to systematically dismantle religion and banish God from the lips, minds, and hearts of the faithful . . .remove His holy name from our civil society, even destroying religious symbols and artifacts along the way.
The media was proud of tens of thousands of BLM protesters last year who rampaged through cities . . .yet, in San Francisco the Roman Catholic archdiocese was slapped with a cease-and-desist order saying some churches violated a local ban on large outdoor gatherings.
Under Critical Race Theory, the BLM protests are "good" even if they violate public health orders, but if Christians want to meet and pray — that's bad and evil! Then singing and chanting in church was banned. "To forbid singing in a church is morally reprehensible. That is how we petition Heaven," said one evangelical minister.
.If churches and synagogues are drowning financially, they can't reach out into the community to feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and help those drowning in a sea of debt and despair. Unable to attend worship services, people are becoming disconnected and distanced from their faith.
This is the war on Christianity, and this is exactly what the left has dreamed about for decades.
Horowitz is Jewish, not Christian and he calls it like he sees it. And he's deeply troubled by what he sees . . .
Hatred is growing in our nation toward Jews and Christians — being spread like wildfire. An evil movement is afoot. After a nearly 15-year drop, the Anti-Defamation League found acts of anti-Semitism started spiking in 2016. What's worse, the most recent numbers show the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in its recorded history. There were over 2,100 acts of violence — assaults, vandalism, and harassment — against Jews.
Horowitz' Book is FREE, compliments of Newsmax.
After reading Dark Agenda, hopefully you will understand the deep divide in America.
Shortly before he died, Rush Limbaugh talked about Dark Agenda. He said the future of America depended on this battle between the forces of good and evil.
Meanwhile:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-partisanship-in-plain-view-11623881726?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
Liberals are fighting to get Critical Race Theory in the classroom.
They want every white person to feel ashamed and guilty about the history of the country. They want every white person to believe that they are inherently racist and to go through a period of “whitewashing.”
Critical Race Theory only accomplishes division. And there are several states that have already passed laws to ban it in the classroom.
Find out more about CRT and why it needs to be banned altogether.
Fighting for Freedom,
Samuel Davis
And:
Many things are going wrong in America and corruption of the mass media is one of the more critical. It seems most everything important is being corrupted in America from education to voting and everything in between. A society that tolerates crime by defunding police, district attorneys who refuse to enforce laws and a growing number of criminals who know they are free to commit crimes with abandon is a society that will crumble. It is simply a matter of time unless changes occur quickly.
What is happening in America is being orchestrated from without as well as within. Radical ideology. foreign to our culture is being funded and propagated by those who want to destroy our nation because a powerful democracy is a threat to the goal of autocrats and autocratic societies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/media-partisanship-in-plain-view-11623881726?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
Finally:
There is much truth in this op ed but, of course, a drunken, abusive and dope saturated father is more a threat to stability and tranquility than an absent father. Affirmative action and patronizing has made the issue worse.
https://townhall.com/columnists/larryelder/2021/06/17/fathers-day-fatherless-americas-top-domestic-problem-n2591106
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| Iran In China's Grand Strategy |
| by Miles Maochun Yu via The Caravan China does not have a fixed Iran doctrine. And Iran does not have a historic China doctrine, as it usually places its geostrategic emphasis on the Middle East, the United States, and Europe. But the two revolutionary regimes are coming together. And: According to sources traveling with Joe Biden for his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden’s angry (see video below) because he feels he’s been upstaged and outdone by Putin. This could explain why Biden all but exploded at a member of the traveling press corp (see video below) who shouted out a question as he was leaving the final press conference. Biden spun on his heels and, with a finger in the air, came back and all but got directly in the face of the reporter. Reportedly, Biden apologized to the press as he boarded Air Force One for his flight home. Watch the video below of Biden losing his temper at a reporter and share your reaction by emailing updates@reclaimingamerica.net. Do you believe the reports that Biden is angry because he feels he’s been upstaged and outdone by Putin? Share this: |
But President Biden has not revised his policies in response
By Clifford D. May
Spies steal secrets. Sometimes, those secrets must be carefully studied and analyzed by experts to turn them into products useful to policymakers.
The spies I’ll be talking about here worked for the Mossad. The expert who has painstakingly transformed the secrets they collected into actionable intelligence is David Albright. And the policymaker who should be revising his policies in response to a clearer picture of reality is President Joe Biden.
The story begins on a cold night in January of 2018 when Israeli agents stealthily broke into a warehouse in southern Tehran where Iran’s rulers had stored an archive of their nuclear weapons program.
In an interview broadcast on Israeli television last week, former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen revealed new details of the operation. Planning required two years and included the construction of a replica of the warehouse. Twenty agents were trained for the mission. None of them were Israelis. They had less than seven hours to carry out their risky mission.
“In the morning, trucks, guards, and workers arrive, and there's a crowd and you can't just jump over fences and break through walls," Mr. Cohen said. "Only when they broke into the formidable safes and began to go through the images and Farsi descriptions did we realize that we have what we wanted on the Iranian military nuclear program.”
The agents quickly spirited the materials – more than 55,000 pages of documentation and nearly 200 computer disks – out of the country. None of the agents was captured but, Mr. Cohen said, some had to be rescued from Iran.
Three months later, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a press conference. He said the materials proved that Tehran had a “program to design, build and test nuclear weapons…to use at a time of its choice to develop nuclear weapons.”
That meant that the nuclear deal President Obama had concluded in 2015, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was predicated on lies told by Iran’s rulers, and that the JCPOA did not, as claimed, block their path to a nuclear weapons capability.
Proponents of the JCPOA insisted there was nothing earth-shattering in the materials, and that Mr. Obama had concluded as good a deal as could be expected. President Trump, long mistrustful of the deal, soon formally withdrew.
David Albright, a physicist, and the founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, also known as the Good ISIS, persuaded the Israeli government to allow him access to the materials. Since then, he and his team have conducted a comprehensive forensic analysis.
The result is a new book: “Iran’s Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons,” co-authored with Sarah Burkhard. He points out that the very “existence and maintenance of a secret archive containing nuclear weapon design and manufacturing data is not compatible with Iran’s legally binding nuclear non-proliferation commitments” under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the fundamental international agreement for preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Albright notes that by “secretly storing and curating an extensive archive focused on developing and building missile-deliverable nuclear weapons,” Iran’s rulers also violated their “JCPOA pledge that ‘under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.’”
The Islamic Republic’s secret nuclear weapons development program, the Amad Plan, was suspended in 2003, after the U.S. military toppled regimes in both Afghanistan and Iraq, causing Iran’s rulers to fear they might be next. But that was a “tactical retreat, not an abandonment” of the regime’s “nuclear weapons ambitions or activities,” Mr. Albright writes.
“The post-Amad goals are among the most critical revelations of the archive,” he continues. Over the past decade, an Iranian Ministry of Defense entity known as SPND has been responsible for developing various nuclear capabilities. “Iran’s lack of cooperation with the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] up until today has increased concerns that a subset of SPND’s activities have remained focused on preserving or carrying forward the activities of the Amad Plan.”
The archive also reveals that Iran’s rulers have “a host of undeclared nuclear sites and activities, all previously dedicated to a covert, and illegal, nuclear weapons program.” What activities are taking place at those sites now is unknown because inspectors from the IAEA have been barred from visiting most of them.
Under the flawed JCPOA, the IAEA also is not permitted to inspect military facilities where nuclear weapons research has been conducted in the past and may be ongoing in the present.
Mr. Albright deduces that Iran’s rulers currently have “a robust capability to make weapon-grade uranium, a capability that will eventually grow more than ten-fold” as restrictions in the JCPOA “sunset” – expire according to dates on the calendar and regardless of Tehran’s conduct.
“At a minimum, Iran has a coordinated set of activities related to building a nuclear weapon,” Mr. Albright writes. “At worst, the weaponization team has already conducted a cold test, fulfilled its post-Amad goal of building an industrial prototype, and is regularly practicing and improving their nuclear weaponization craft under various covers or in clandestine locations.”
Which leads to this conclusion: “A reinstated JCPOA combined with less than vigorous IAEA verification of Iran’s military sites, of the type that existed from 2015 until 2018, appears particularly unstable and dangerous.”
Spies risked their lives to steal secrets from an Islamist police state. An esteemed American expert has detailed what those secrets reveal. President Biden can adjust his policies to reflect the reality that has been exposed.
Or he can gift militant theocrats whose rallying cry is “Death to America!” billions of dollars and let them develop a nuclear weapons capability over the years ahead. That is almost certain to lead to runaway nuclear proliferation and devastating conflicts. This should not be a tough call.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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Iran says it has 6.5 kg of 60%-enriched uranium, inching closer to weapons-grade
In further breach of nuclear deal and amid talks on striking new agreement, spokesperson says Tehran has also stockpiled 108 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20% purity
By TOI staff
Iran said Tuesday that it has produced 6.5 kilograms (14.3 pounds) of uranium enriched to 60 percent purity and 108 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20% purity in five months, far ahead of the schedule set by a law passed earlier this year by Tehran.
The move takes the Islamic Republic even closer to the nuclear weapons-grade level of 90% purity.
The development came amid talks between Iran and world powers in Vienna aimed at rebuilding the 2015 nuclear deal that put curbs on Tehran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Iran has been increasingly violating the terms of the deal since the Trump administration withdrew the United States from it in 2018.
“Under parliament’s law… the Atomic Energy Organization was supposed to produce 120 kg of 20 percent enriched uranium in a year. According to the latest report, we now have produced 108 kg of 20% uranium in the past five months,” government spokesman Ali Rabiei was quoted as saying by state media, according to the Reuters news agency.
“In the area of 60% uranium production, in the short time that has elapsed… about 6.5 kg has been produced,” he added.
Iran’s government spokesman Ali Rabiei speaks at a regular news briefing, on July 22, 2019. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
The United Nations’ atomic watchdog said last month that it had not been able to access data important to monitoring Iran’s nuclear program since late February, when the Islamic Republic started restricting international inspections of its facilities.
The International Atomic Energy Agency made the comment in a report that estimated that as of May 22, Iran’s stockpile included 62.8 kilograms (138.5 pounds) of uranium enriched to 20% purity, and 2.4 kilograms enriched to 60% purity — well above the 3.67% purity allowed under the deal.
Iran’s Governor to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Kazem Gharib Abadi, Political deputy at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Iran, Abbas Araghchi, and Deputy Secretary General and Political Director of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Enrique Mora stand in front of the ‚Grand Hotel Vienna’ where where closed-door nuclear talks take place in Vienna, Austria, June 2, 2021. (AP Photo/Lisa Leutner)
In the same IAEA report, the agency for the first time released estimates of Iran’s stockpile rather than precise figures, saying that the total stockpile was 3,241 kilograms (7,145 pounds), up about 273 kilograms (600 pounds) from the last quarterly report.
That was down from an increase of nearly 525 kilograms (1,157 pounds) reported in the previous quarterly report.
Though it was not immediately clear what led to the decrease, it came as an explosion in April at Iran’s underground Natanz nuclear facility affected centrifuges there. Iran has yet to offer a full accounting of what happened in an attack it described as “nuclear terrorism.” Israel, which is widely suspected of carrying out the assault, has not commented publicly on it.
The nuclear deal signed in 2015 with the United States, Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia only permits Iran only to keep a total stockpile of 202.8 kilograms (447 pounds) of enriched uranium.
Leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy nations and members of NATO on Monday reaffirmed a commitment to stop Iran from making nuclear weapons, as diplomats from outside the European Union cautioned that negotiations with the Islamic Republic to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal still need more time.
AP contributed to this report.
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Long but salient:
Matthew Foldihttps://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/15/almost-overnight-standards-of-colorblind-merit-tumble-across-american-society/
And:
Short but disheartening:
NYC Law School Makes ‘Systemic Racism’ Courses a Graduation Requirement
A top New York City law school announced Thursday that students will be required to take courses on systemic racism and critical race theory to graduate.
In an email to students, Yeshiva University's Cardozo School of Law laid out major curriculum changes "designed to help our students examine and understand racism in the law and throughout the legal system." Chief among the changes is that students beginning with the incoming class of 2024 must complete at least one of four newly created classes on "race and the law" in order to graduate. The four classes are Race and the Law, Critical Race Theory, Indigenous Rights in the Americas, and Cross-Cultural Negotiation.
The email further announced that "explorations of race and racism" would be integrated throughout all the school's teachings, "including in courses that are not primarily or ostensibly about race." All first-year students going forward will also be required to attend training sessions on topics such as "implicit bias" and "microaggressions."
"Cardozo is committed to training lawyers who can recognize and respond to the ways in which systemic racism impacts our world," the school wrote in the unsigned email.
The changes were spurred by the law school's dean, Melanie Leslie, who last year was one of several law school deans who wrote to the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which accredits law schools, "urging it to require that schools address bias, cultural awareness, and anti-racism," the email states.
Citing "systemic racism," Leslie is quoted in the email explaining that "the history of racism and discrimination in America is intertwined and supported by law and legal structures." Her statement adds, "As scholars and advocates, it is critical that we do our part at Cardozo to acknowledge and eradicate systemic racism; as educators, we must ensure that our graduates are culturally competent and well-educated on issues of discrimination."
The school additionally created a position of Associate Dean of Equity in Curriculum and Teaching.
Cardozo School of Law is currently ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the 53rd best law school in the country.
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Who is Governor De Santis?
Subject: Fwd: RON DESANTIS. - THE GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA.
Just in case you were wondering why 60 Minutes had a hit piece on this Paisan - the Governor of Florida.
Anyone who criticizes him - I have a question for you - can you please post your education and service to our country in a resume so we can put things in perspective?
Ronald Dion DeSantis was born on September 14, 1978, in Jacksonville, Florida, the son of Karen (née Rogers) and Ronald DeSantis.
[1] He is of Italian descent.
[2] His family moved to Orlando, Florida, before relocating to Dunedin, Florida, when he was six years old.
[3] In 1991, he was a member of the Little League team from Dunedin National that made it to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.
[4] After graduating from Dunedin High School in 1997, DeSantis attended Yale University. He was captain of Yale's varsity baseball team and joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.
[5] On the Yale baseball team, DeSantis was an outfielder; as a senior in 2001, he had the team's best batting average at .336.
[6] He graduated from Yale in 2001 with a B.A. magna cum laude in history.
[7] He then spent a year as a history teacher at the Darlington School.
[8] DeSantis then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 2005 with a Juris Doctor cum laude.
[9] DeSantis received his Reserve Naval officer's commission and assignment to the Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG) in 2004 at the U.S. Naval Reserve Center in Dallas, Texas, while still a student at Harvard Law School.
[10] He completed Naval Justice School in 2005.
[11] Later that year, he received orders to the JAG Trial Service Office Command South East at Naval Station Mayport, Florida, as a prosecutor.
[12] In 2006, he was promoted from lieutenant, junior grade to lieutenant. He worked for the commander of Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO), working directly with detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Joint Detention Facility.
[13] In 2007, DeSantis reported to the Naval Special Warfare Command Group in Coronado, California, where he was assigned to SEAL Team One and deployed to Iraq with the troop surge as the Legal Advisor to the SEAL Commander, Special Operations Task Force-West in Fallujah.
[14] DeSantis returned to the U.S. in April 2008, at which time he was reassigned to the Naval Region Southeast Legal Service.
[15] The U.S. Department of Justice appointed him to serve as an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Middle District of Florida.
[16] DeSantis was assigned as a trial defense counsel until his honorable discharge from active duty in February 2010.
[17] He concurrently accepted a reserve commission as a lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General's Corps of the US Navy Reserve.
[18] He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, the Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal, the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, and the Iraq Campaign Medal.
Well obviously, he is NOT qualified to be a Democrat, or serve in a senior political position in our nation’s capital.
He would just be a trouble maker! Worse than Trump.
Who does he think he is anyway?
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It's in California, the land of hypocrite liberals and apostates so why should one expect otherwise?
https://freebeacon.com/campus/stanford-mental-health-workers-say-university-counseling-ignores-and-intimidates-jews/
And:
Worth a serious listen:
https://wethescreamers.com/
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Common sense seems to lose out in America today:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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St John's meets the Winiarski's generous challenge:
The Winiarski Challenge
“We believe deeply in the St. John’s College Program and value the impact it continues to have on our own lives. With the Winiarski Family Foundation Challenge now met, we are confident that many more generations of students seeking this education will have the opportunity to realize it, and in doing so, that it will foster their respect for reasoning, questioning, and learning as it did for us.” – Barbara and Warren Winiarski
Five years ago, we asked a question. It was the kind of query usually posed to spark a discussion in seminar: What must we do to secure the financial future of St. John’s College and our students?
Responding to this question were alumni Warren Winiarski, founder of Napa, California-based Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, and Barbara Winiarski, a member of the first class of women at St. John’s. Their extraordinary answer was to issue a challenge: if alumni and friends could raise $50 million in cash gifts, the Winiarski Family Foundation would match those gifts, dollar for dollar, with a $50 million contribution to the St. John’s endowment.
Today, with great pride, we can announce that we met that challenge. We did so because of you—nearly 5,000 alumni and friends offered more than 17,000 matched individual gifts.
The Winiarski Family Foundation Challenge has been essential to moving St. John’s closer to our larger goal for the Freeing Minds campaign: raising $300 million to transform the financial model of the college. Prior to launching the campaign, tuition had exceeded $50,000, enrollment was down, and the college was running a $12 million structural deficit. Now, we’ve slashed tuition to $35,000, brought up enrollment, eliminated our deficit, and implemented our plan to create a new philanthropy-centered financial model that guarantees the future of the Program.
“I think it goes to show that if people see the college doing the right thing, they will support it, and support it enthusiastically” said Campaign Chair Warren Spector. “We knew $300 million was an ambitious goal for a college of our size, and the pandemic made that goal even more ambitious. Thanks to Warren and Barbara’s extraordinary challenge and the outpouring of generosity from alumni and friends, we’ve raised an incredible $245 million in less than three years.”
Thank you to all who contributed to this challenge. Because of your support, the college is on its best financial footing in decades and a St. John’s education is more attainable than ever. We still have $55 million to raise to meet our $300 million goal, and we hope we can count on you over the next two years to continue to safeguard the Program, improve the student experience, and fulfill the Freeing Minds promise of affordability. Working together, we will continue to answer the question in many remarkable ways.
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This strikes me as a fair and balanced summation of Biden's meeting with Putin:
Five takeaways from the Biden-Putin summit
BY NIALL STANAGE
The last time President Biden met Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says he told the Russian leader he didn’t believe he had a soul.
That exchange was just one of the reasons the meeting between the two men in Geneva on Wednesday was so highly anticipated.
The summit — the final engagement on Biden’s weeklong trip to Europe — came amid tensions around Ukraine, the treatment of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, recent cyberattacks and allegations of election meddling.
Here are the five main takeaways.
A return to pragmatis
The White House was careful to downplay expectations for the summit, stressing there were no “deliverables” or major breakthroughs expected.
So it proved. Biden instead sought to frame the meeting as an exercise in worldly pragmatism.
In a news conference afterward, he stressed the importance of “strategic stability.”
By that, he seemed to mean that there should be a workable degree of predictability regarding what Washington or Moscow might do in various scenarios — and an awareness of the red lines for each nation.
On cybersecurity, he asserted that any attacks orchestrated by Russia would be met by a meaningful — if vaguely described — response from the United States.
Biden made clear he and Putin weren’t miraculously going to fall into lockstep. Rather, he held out the possibility that the Russian leader could burnish his country’s reputation over time by staying within international norms.
“This is not a ‘Kumbaya’ moment … but it’s clearly not in anybody’s interest — your country or mine — for us to be in a situation where we’re in a new cold war,” Biden added.
Such statements aren’t exactly exciting. But they show Biden trying to walk a fine line.
He knows his political and media opponents at home are eager to brand him as weak in his dealings with Putin, so some tonal toughness is required. At the same time, if Biden had contrived a dramatic blowup, it would have raised new questions about why the U.S. had issued the invite to the summit in the first place.
In the end, the event met modest expectations.
Putin, for his part, struck a similar tone.
“What’s the point of keeping score?” he said at his own press conference, which preceded Biden’s. “It makes no sense to try to scare one another.”
Capitol riot rears its head
The most contentious subject from the two leaders’ dueling news conferences was an unexpected one — the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Putin raised the issue in response to a question about human rights in Russia. It’s a hot topic in general, particularly amid criticism of the Kremlin’s treatment of Navalny.
Putin reacted in characteristic fashion, drawing attention to U.S. abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the continued existence of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay.
But he then drew the insurrection into the same broad argument, saying mildly that “people came to the U.S. Capitol with political demands.” The law enforcement response, he suggested, had been too harsh.
This view — which replicates the talking points of the most fervent supporters of former President Trump — irked Biden when it was put to him at his news conference.
The president said any comparison of Jan. 6 with legitimate protest was “ridiculous.”
The Jan. 6 rioters, he added, were “literally criminals” who had broken through a security cordon to assail the Capitol.
Biden praised as 'not Trump'
Biden had one big advantage going into Wednesday’s summit — the low bar set by his predecessor.
When Trump met Putin in Helsinki in 2018, the U.S. president was widely criticized for a craven performance. Trump infamously appeared to take Putin’s word over the testimony of U.S. intelligence agencies about whether Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) branded Trump’s behavior at that meeting “disgraceful.”
Biden has sought to reassure U.S. allies over the past week that “America is back” — a clear allusion to the disruption and frequent chaos of the Trump years.
Much of the commentary that initially followed Wednesday’s summit measured Biden’s performance against that of his predecessor.
For the most part, Biden earned positive reviews simply by staying within the standard parameters. In doing so, he offered a contrast to Trump’s seeming delight in trampling on every line.
Putin relishes occasion
Putin’s desire to flex Russian muscle on the world stage is well known.
The Russian president — a KGB agent at the time the Soviet Union crumbled — is sensitive to any diminution of his country’s importance.
Criticisms of Biden’s decision to propose the summit centered on the idea that the event was sure to elevate Putin.
The Russian president certainly seemed to relish the spotlight. His lengthy press conference was mostly relaxed and even, on occasion, jocular. While he complained about American double-standards on issues like human rights, he was at pains to point out that the atmosphere at his meeting with Biden had been constructive.
“There was no hostility, quite the contrary,” he said. On several occasions, he praised Biden’s experience.
Putin’s clear enjoyment of the event irked some observers. One critic, the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, complained on MSNBC that Putin had “got what he wanted” simply by virtue of the summit taking place.
Questions linger about details
The summit provided some positive mood music for Biden and Putin, but it is unclear whether it presages any real change.
An extension of the New START arms reduction treaty had already been agreed in advance of the summit. Putin said the two nations had agreed that their ambassadors, who had been recalled to their home countries this spring, would return to their posts soon.
Afterward, the White House issued a statement noting that the two nations “will embark together on an integrated bilateral Strategic Stability Dialogue in the near future that will be deliberate and robust.”
The proposal is nebulous, and it could be undone at a moment’s notice by anything that raises frictions, such as new cyberattacks.
This, in turn, explains Biden’s positive but cautious tone.
Asked at his news conference whether he trusted Putin, the president pushed back against the terms of the question.
“This is not about trust. This is about self-interest and verification of self-interest,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”
Asked at his news conference whether he trusted Putin, the president pushed back against the terms of the question.
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