against people like putin and the autocrats is to go after their corruption. not just by sanctions but by laying out there in the same way that navalny was doing. i think that the concern of our that the erosion of our democracy is happening and you see wit the january 6th insurrection and the truth and high-level russian officials siding with the insurrectionists and talking about it and their support for trump loyalists around the world. sure. i mean, just because trump is out of office doesn t mean that the threat he posed to the democracy is over. that s what so many democrats are saying and that s what you know, we were grappling with, the republicans who kiboshed the january 6th commission seemed to be parroting putin s talking points. putin is meeting with joe biden in geneva for the first summit. what s your assessment in terms of what the president s goals will be for that and how there s
where it happened a white house memoir. he wrote an op-ed, criticizing and sanctioning lukashenko is no substitute for an actual strategy on belarus and he writes in part this there is no question the west rightly concluded that belarus committed air piracy, behavior entirely consistent with the regimes, autocratic methods and alexei navalny and many others can testify has the hallmarks of putin s equally authoritarian state next door. unfortunately, however, virtue-signaling, even accompanied by economicna sanctions, does not constitute a satisfactory western strategy to resolve a vastly more important issue. what is the future for belarus as a whole. will it be encouraged to follow the path of former warsaw pact states and at least some former soviet republics into the west? or will it be allowed to suffer full annexation into russia and
george soros and i m thinking to myself, this sounds awfully familiar, what s happening to the united states. sure enough, when you interrogate the playbook was taken from putin s playbook, this is something that s spread across the world. at the same time, xi jinping and the chinese have become much more assertive in pushing their model and not only as government, but as a society. what joe biden understands and having worked with him over the years, we are at an existential moment at this country in america, not because the republican party has become so extreme but it s part of a global trend. this is the direction of events. we have to reverse that because if we lose democracy as we have seen in many other places it is hard to get it back. ben, one of your main points is that corruption really turbo challenges to fall into authoritarianism and the united states, you know, we have seen
anything. jonathan lemire, you were in helsinki. you asked vladimir putin the question. you re going to geneva. do you think when you raise your hand will he answer your question or will he throw a shoe at youe like bush had a couple shoes thrown at him? i m not going to accept any russian tea while in geneva. i will be traveling with the president when he makes his first overseas in a couple weeks. they re broadcasting he ll talk tough with putin, deliver that warning to knock off, knock off the interference that donald trump never did and refused to do when i asked him in helsinki, but the message will also be not just towi putin, messaging heres so important to the other countries where he will be visiting ons that trip. it s about sending a signal to his european allies that the u.s. is back and count on us again and be reliable partners again and we havebl your back wn itd comes to russia as we re seeing this aggression, we re
president biden and premier chairman putin. could you please, for us, define success and failure from that meeting. what would be success for the united states? what would be failure for the united states? well, i don t expect success as i say. the new start is the central strategic position between the two countries. biden s perspective is wrong. that s a mark of failure there. i think f what biden can do is try and explain what i certainly feel, which is that the trump administration, donald trump, personally, was an anomaly in american foreign policy. and that the united states is really quite united against russian interference in our election. the kinds of interference russia has engaged in through various forms of cyber warfare and countries in europe. and that we insist that this kind of behavior has to stop.as