Originally Aired: June 15, 2021

When Vladimir Putin sits down with Joe Biden, both men will be well familiar with each other and Putin will have no illusions that he can toy with the new American president like he could with the last one. Joe Biden has been working at a high level in US foreign policy since 1973 (when Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.) As Biden's Europe trip has demonstrated this past week, he is a savvy foreign policy professional who knows how to pull the levers of diplomacy behind the scenes. If not every speech is a barn burner, the results so far outstrip those of all his recent predecessors in their first years in office. We discuss the Putin meeting with David Sanger of the New York Times, who is traveling with the president, and Evelyn Farkas, former senior Obama Administration official and Russia specialist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices