President Biden’s first meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin could be the most contentious between the leaders of the two countries since the Cold War ended three decades ago.
Biden has an agenda of grievances, complaints and protests pertaining to Russian activities abroad and Putin’s suppression of dissidents at home. Putin has shown no interest in altering his behavior and has his own lists of accusations about U.S. actions in Europe and the Middle East.
So this meeting June 16 in Geneva, unlike Putin’s meeting with President Trump in 2018, will recall the long and often tumultuous series of summits between the leaders of the two powers dating back to World War II and their decades of jockeying for dominance on the global stage.
Creating the postwar world
British Prime minister Winston Churchill (left), President Franklin D. Roosevelt and USSR Secretary General of the Soviet Communist Party Joseph Stalin pose at the start of the Conference of the Allied powers in Yalta, Crimea, on Feb. 4, 1945 at the end of World War II.
STF/AFP via Getty Images
The postwar world was born, in a real sense, in the first summit meetings between U.S. and Soviet leaders while World War II raged. Soviet dictator Josef Stalin met twice with President Franklin Roosevelt and then with his successor, Harry Truman, each time with the fate of entire continents very much in the balance.
Roosevelt met Stalin in 1943 and early in 1945, both times in the presence of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the 1943 meeting, held in Tehran, Stalin promised not to make a separate peace with Germany, and the Anglo-American leaders promised to open a second front in France within a year.
In February 1945, with Germany nearing defeat, the Big 3 met at Yalta, the Soviet Black Sea resort. Here, Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan after Germany had surrendered, but did not make any commitments regarding the European territory his Red Army was taking from the retreating Nazis. At that point, Roosevelt had only weeks to live.
In July 1945, after Germany had surrendered and Roosevelt had died, Truman took his place at a meeting of the Big 3 at Potsdam, near a bombed-out Berlin. He would learn in the course of the conference that the first nuclear explosion had been successful at a test site in New Mexico. Historians have long debated whether Truman, who had been president less than four months, should have used this knowledge to put more pressure on Stalin. As it happened, the Soviets promised to join and respect the United Nations, and to hold free elections in the countries they occupied — a promise they would not keep.
