This interview by Melissa De Witte originally appeared in Stanford News.

The upcoming summit between President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin is not rewarding the Russian leader for his bad behavior: It’s opening negotiations and delivering a warning to him instead, says Stanford scholar Kathryn Stoner.

Here, Stoner is joined by Stanford political scientist and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, Payne Distinguished Lecturer at CISAC and former Deputy Secretary General of NATO Rose Gottemoeller and Russia historian Norman Naimark to discuss what to expect at the summit in Geneva on Wednesday.

The meeting, the scholars say, could reset U.S.-Russia relations, signal deterrence on certain issues – including cybersecurity in light of attacks like the SolarWinds breach that the U.S. has blamed on the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service – and launch strategic stability talks related to nuclear weapons.

Interviews have been edited for length and clarity. For more information on what to expect about the Biden-Putin summit from FSI scholars, visit the FSI website.

Where does diplomacy now stand between the U.S. and Russia?

Naimark: Russian-American relations are at their lowest point since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, perhaps even since the last years of Gorbachev’s rule. When relations are fraying between the world’s two most powerful nuclear powers, the coming of the summit on June 16 between President Biden and President Putin should be welcomed. It’s worth recalling the heightened military tensions just three months ago between Moscow and Washington, when Moscow moved tens of thousands of troops to the Ukrainian border and mobilized its air and sea power in the region. Both leaders have emphasized that they seek stability, reliability and predictability in their bilateral relations; at the same time, their respective administrations have warned that expectations should be kept at the minimum for any kind of serious breakthrough at the summit.

Stoner: We’ve lost a lot of leverage because of the withdrawal from global politics that started under the latter part of the Obama administration and continued with Trump with his America First platform, which meant America alone. There is some leverage, it’s just how much. We don’t necessarily want to destabilize Russia because it’s a big, complicated country with nuclear weapons, but all signs point to Putin staying in office until 2036. He’s not going away. I think we have to try to signal deterrence on certain issues, like trying to move into another former Soviet republic as he is doing with Ukraine, Georgia and potentially Belarus, but then cooperate in other areas where it is productive to do so.

What do you think about some of the criticisms toward Biden meeting with Putin? For example, that Biden meeting with Putin is only rewarding him for his bad behavior.

Stoner: There is a reasonable question about why Biden and Putin are meeting and if it is somehow rewarding Putin for bad behavior by having a summit with the President of the United States. Rather than rewarding Putin, however, I think this meeting could be Biden’s warning to him that if hacking and other cyberattacks continue, we have a menu of things we could do as well.

Naimark: There is no reason that the American president cannot talk about difficult subjects like cybersecurity, ransomware attacks, human rights, the release of Alexei Navalny, the protection of Ukrainian sovereignty and other important items on the American agenda while focusing on issues of mutual interest: the future of arms control, global warming and the regulation of the Arctic, and outer space. One can always hope that, like the last summit on Lake Geneva between Russian and American leaders [Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan] in November 1985, this one can lay the groundwork for serious improvements in relations in the near future.

Is this meeting a reset of diplomatic relations between the two nations?

Stoner: I know in Washington it is popular to say that Biden is not having a reset of relations with Russia when past presidents all have tried that. I think that’s wrong. I do think it is a reset in the relationship in that there should be more clarity and stability, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be friendly and universally cooperative, given that we still see many differences in perspectives and some antagonism too. Still, Russia and the U.S. need to talk because there are a lot of issues in common where it would be helpful to coordinate with Russia. After all, even in the depths of the Cold War, the leaders of both countries still talked. Russia has reestablished itself as the most formidable power in Europe and it looks like Biden is acknowledging that and the fact that the U.S. can no longer afford to ignore Russia.

Is there anything the two leaders will be able to agree upon?

McFaul: I used to organize these kinds of meetings when I worked in the government and back when President Medvedev was there. We would have these meetings as a way to force our governments to produce what is called in State Department-speak “deliverables.” We didn’t have meetings to have them, we wanted to get things done. In the first Obama-Medvedev meeting we had a long list of deliverables when they met in July of 2009.

But there is no way that will happen with Putin today because he doesn’t really want to cooperate, he doesn’t really want deliverables. That’s challenging for President Biden, I think, because he has said that he wants a stable, predictable relationship with Putin. I think that’s fine to aspire to, but I don’t think Putin is that interested in that kind of relationship, so that creates a challenge of substance for summits like this.

Gottemoeller: With such different threat perceptions, the two presidents are not going to agree in Geneva about what should go into the next nuclear treaty. They can agree, though, to put their experts together to hammer it out. They can also agree to put the two sides together to tackle the different threat perceptions and the question of what stability means. Finally, they can agree to a deadline, so the talks don’t stall. It won’t be a headline-grabbing outcome, but at least Moscow and Washington will get moving again on the nuclear agenda.

Where can Biden make progress?

McFaul: I think the most likely place to make progress is to launch strategic stability talks, which is an abstract phrase for beginning the process of negotiations about nuclear weapons and their delivery vehicles that would be a follow-on to the New START treaty. Biden and Putin rightfully extended the New START treaty early in his term for five years, and I think that was very smart. I personally worked on that treaty, so I think it’s a good treaty and deserves to be extended. But it’s going to run out really fast because the next set of negotiations are going to be much more complicated. I hope they would start some process to begin those negotiations now.

Gottemoeller: Maybe the only place where President Biden can make progress with Vladimir Putin in Geneva is the nuclear agenda with Russia. Since the two men agreed, in February, to extend the New START treaty by five years, they have put out a clear public message that they intend to pursue a deal to replace New START and to launch strategic stability talks. They are not going to have identical ideas, however, about what those two goals mean.

Biden wants a new arms control deal that will control all nuclear warheads, whether launched on intercontinental strategic-range missiles or on shorter-range systems. He also wants to get a handle on some of the new types of nuclear weapons that the Russians have been developing. One new system, for example, uses nuclear propulsion to ensure that it can fly for many hours at great speed over long distances, earning it the moniker “weapon of vengeance.” These exotic weapons did not exist when New START was negotiated; now, they need to be controlled.

Putin, by contrast, focuses on U.S. long-range conventional missiles that he worries are capable of the accuracy and destructive power of nuclear weapons. The United States, in his view, could use these conventional weapons to destroy hard targets such as the Moscow nuclear command center. He also worries that the United States is producing ever more capable ways to intercept his nuclear missiles and destroy them before they reach their targets. In his worst nightmare, the United States undermines his nuclear deterrent forces without ever resorting to nuclear weapons.

What advice do you have for Biden?

McFaul: One, do not have a one-on-one meeting – just have a normal meeting. Two, I would recommend not having a joint press conference that just gives Putin a podium for the world to say his “whataboutism” stuff; it’s better to have separate press conferences because most of the world will be more interested in what Biden says compared to what Putin says.

Third, I think it’s important to cooperate when you can but also be clear about your differences and don’t pull punches on that. In particular, I want Biden to talk about Alexei Navalny, the Americans who are wrongly detained in Russia today, Crimea still being occupied, Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine, and parts of Georgia that are under occupation. They have been attacking us relentlessly with these cyberattacks, these Russian criminals who in my view have to have some association with the Russian government.

That’s a tough list, but I think it’s really important for President Biden to say those things directly to Putin. I have confidence that he can. I was at their last meeting. I traveled with the vice president in 2011 when he met with then Prime Minister Putin. Biden is capable of delivering tough messages and I hope he uses this occasion to do so again.

What would be a sign that their meeting was productive?

Stoner: One sign the meeting was productive would be if Biden and Putin could agree to establish a joint committee or council on some rules surrounding cybersecurity. Another would be if they make plans to talk again about either replacing or reviving the Minsk-2 agreement [that sought to bring an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine]. And three, a positive sign would be if they plan to do some negotiation on further reducing tactical nuclear weapons or strategic nuclear weapons. An agreement to disagree on some issues, but to continue talking on others would be indicative of at least some small progress.

On April 21, 2021, the APARC China Program hosted Professor Erin Baggott Carter, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Southern California, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law. Her program, "When Beijing Goes to Washington: Autocratic Lobbying Influence in Democracies," explored how lobbying from China and China-based companies can affect policy in the United States. Professor Jean Oi, William Haas Professor of Chinese Politics and director of the APARC China Program, moderated the event.

Professor Baggot Carter based her talk on a dataset drawn from the public records of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, which includes over 10,000 lobbying activities undertaken by the Chinese government between 2005 and 2019. According to Baggot Carter, the evidence suggests that Chinese government lobbying makes legislators at least twice as likely to sponsor legislation that is favorable to Chinese interests. Moreover, US media outlets that participated in Chinese-government sponsored trips subsequently covered China as less threatening. Coverage pivoted away from US-China military rivalry and the CCP’s persecution of religious minorities and toward US-China economic cooperation. These results suggest that autocratic lobbying poses an important challenge to democratic integrity. Watch now: 

“Accommodate a despotic ruler if you have to,” says Stephen Krasner, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies in his forthcoming book How to Make Love to a Despot: An Alternative Foreign Policy for the Twenty-first Century  (Liveright, 2020). Krasner suggests that by embracing rational choice institutionalism, the U.S. should be working with the elites the way they are, rather than expecting them to abide by our standards; aiming for not more and not less than “good enough governance.” We talked with Professor Krasner in more detail about his “third approach.”

Q: Your book How to Make Love to A Despot is coming out in April. The main takeaway is that the United States is permanently oscillating between two bad foreign policies and you are suggesting a third way. You say that the United States lives in a delusion that the rest of the world can and should be like us?

Krasner: I think the problem is that the United States has assumed that every other country could be a consolidated democracy. I think the clearest example of that is China. The assumption was that China would get richer, would have a large middle class, and it would become democratic. They'd be just like us. In the 20th century the United States, basically since it entered World War One, and then later through Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. wanted to turn the world into a set of consolidated democracies. That has worked sometimes but most of the time it hasn't worked. What I suggest in the book is what we should aim for is good enough governance that may turn into consolidated democracy at some point in the future, or it may not. It requires luck for that to happen, not just having the right conditions. But at least we wouldn't be inhibiting consolidated democracy from ultimately emerging.

Q: I can't resist but to ask about these examples you mentioned: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, these are all countries where the US has intervened with military force. So, when you say democracy promotion, what do you mean by it? Does this entitle military interventions too?

Krasner: I don't think it entitles a military intervention. Most of our military interventions have failed. I worked in the Bush administration, I think that President George W. Bush definitely believed that if you invaded Iraq and you demonstrated the benefits of democracy, that people would become democratic. And I think the fallacy here is that it was a kind of naturalness that if we intervene, we will be successful. I think the problem with active efforts at democracy promotion is that most of the time having a consolidated democracy means that you'll undermine the position of the traditional elite or the ruling elite. And they were not going to accept that. And they know more about the country than we do. So even things that are very well funded, have very well intentions, very well designed, often fail.

Q: So, do you honestly believe that the tendency of war in Iraq was democracy promotion?

Krasner: I do. I honestly believe that. I was in the administration at the time and I completely believe it. I think that Bush really believed that if we took the sewer cover off in Iraq, that that freedom would spring forth. In fact, that's not what sprang forth. I think that we did believe that it was relatively easy. When you're rationalizing why you're doing things in the rest of the world, why you're intervening in other parts of the world the standard American line would be that we're intervening to promote consolidated democracy, which actually turns out to be extremely difficult.

Q: From all the reasons that you just mentioned, you're suggesting the third course, with an awareness that we can't fix the world the way it is, but we can't ignore it either. So, in which way do you suggest that the United States should interact with the world? And how deep should it go and for how long?

Krasner: I think the problem is that we have entered a world in which in the near future it will be relatively easy to create malicious germs, nuclear weapons, etc. At this point, we kind of assumed that more information was better, and great information would rise to the top. That hasn't necessarily been the case. So, we can't detach ourselves from the rest of the world because even non-state actors with relatively limited capabilities, which is what Al-Qaeda was, are able to use weapons against the thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans. So, I don't think we can ignore the world. What we can do is to aim for good enough governance. The first thing is that you must be supported by national elites. Even if those national elites are autocratic. I think that way we could provide better security. We can provide some improvement in services, especially in health, which has been a big, big success story since 1945. We also must accept that the idea that we can eliminate corruption is entirely impossible. As you know, patronage is better than stealing a $100 million and moving it outside of the country. But that's the best that we can hope to do.

Q: So, the question is—how do you create this index of what is going to be tolerated and what is not going to be tolerated? What is good enough governance in practice?

Krasner: I don't have a clear answer to that. Good enough governance has to mean that we're trying to create a security environment in other countries, where governments are capable of policing their own territory, which might not always be possible. I don't think we can eliminate, but certainly, try to minimize threats that might arise elsewhere. The problem would be if the government is so repressive that it engenders a large-scale domestic reaction. Now, for the most part, you have to be really, really repressive and really stupid to have that happen, but it does happen sometimes, as it did in Sudan. Ideally, we should try and find government leaders who are inclusive enough that they'll be able to support and maintain the support of backers, necessary to keep them in power. And that's a part I'm uncertain about. I don't have a general rule for that. I think you'd just have to look at a particular situation.

Q: You must agree that there are many regions of the world where many countries are actually relying heavily on the help from the outside and count on active engagement with the U.S.?

Krasner: Yes. So, let me say something which I have to say I'm not certain about. I think acting because we assume that there are some things that are morally intolerable to people who lead the revolution is in general a mistake. Most of the time, if the government is able to keep a relatively stable situation and people are able to satisfy the material resources, I don't think they're likely to revolt. Now, if you look at the bigger revolts we've had, I mean, for instance, the revolt in Russia that led to the Soviet Union, the Romanovs were pretty inefficient and pretty ineffective. They were able to carry on a war for three years until the regime finally collapsed. But it took a lot of fairly bad policies to make that happen. So, what I'm arguing is that in general, I think that we assume that you can't have lasting peace unless you have a peace that's morally sustainable. I am, I should say assuming, because I haven't really done the empirical work in this, but assuming that people are willing to tolerate a lot of things that they consider immoral provided that the government provides them with some basic level of services including security.

Q: When you rely on local elites, as you say in your book, and they always serve their own interests, what would be the foreign policy mechanisms to limit how far that can go? Since the ramifications could be serious and lead the countries deeper into corruption and partocracy.

Krasner: I think that there is no formula for that. We've engaged, we've spent a lot of money directly on democracy promotion. Often the money is basically undermined. Azerbaijan, in the last election, had 50 election observers. 49 said the elections were okay. Only one, which was in the European Union, said the elections were corrupt. If you looked at CICIG in Guatemala, here was an organization that was set up by an agreement between the Guatemalan government and the secretary-general of the United Nations. What are the results? CICIG was disbanded within the last year and the effort to create something like CICIG in Honduras basically failed. In some cases, domestic leaders may misunderstand how threatening some of these organizations are and you have to assume that they know more about their country than we do. And they're not going to accept things which would result in their losing power, possibly being killed, possibly being exiled.

Q: In your book, you’re criticizing modernization theory saying that it just assumes that democracy and welfare can be attained relatively easily. You are also not so sure that putting an effort into building institutional capacity in those countries is enough. Still, in many cases, education on building institutional capacity dramatically helped in reforms.

Krasner: It may work, and it may not. I'm not saying I'm opposed to doing these things, but we shouldn't assume that they're going to easily lead to a consolidated democracy in the end. Hobbes, Samuel Huntington, they both say that you need institutional capacity, but the problem is what is going to prevent leaders who have lots of institutional capacity from acting in ways that serve their own interests, opposed to interests of a population? You're not going to be able to build institutions if they threaten the local political elite. If you look historically only for a relatively short period of time, generously the last couple of hundred years, have you had consolidated democracies in which the political elite could lose power as a result of decisions that were taken by the electorate and most of the world. It's pretty unusual. It’s happened in North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. It hasn't happened in other parts of the world. We shouldn't assume then it's kind of the natural order of things. If you look at recent developments in the United States, it is important that rulers have a set of norms in which they value the foundational values of the country. But if you get a ruler who isn't very interested in those norms, you can have a lot of bad things happen.

Q: The theory that you suggest and call rational choice institutionalism relies on the elites and it stresses that elites will be willing to tie their own hands and adopt policies that benefit the population as a whole only under certain conditions. But when we take a step back and we do look at consolidated democracies, we see that many of the values in those societies are actually the foundation for the policies in those countries. And these values were nurtured over time.

Krasner: I agree with that. In consolidated democracies people have the elite, the political leaders adopted a set of values. It's true in most of the United States, it's true in the American military, it's true in parts of Western Europe in which people do actually cherish these values. But I think often they came later, and they weren't necessarily there in the beginning. I also think religion is one set of values that really matters to people. You have these Evangelical Christians in the United States who, you know, they see Trump, I think they see Trump as being a sinful individual, but they see him as the best bet to defend values that they endorse. Many people in the rest of the United States, they're looking around and seeing a world in which their material wellbeing has just deteriorated for 30 or 40 or 50 years, whether there’s Democrats or Republicans in office, they don't have any belief in anything anymore. Also, if you look at race relations in the United States, they are very troubled. They have been troubled for 300 years.

Q: So, does this mean that your overall understanding of the world today is that it's so bad that the United States should focus on self-preservation and just look at how to protect our safety?

Krasner: So, I think we should do two things. First of all, I think we should be concerned with how well our own society is functioning. In this sense, I think Donald Trump isn't so, isn't to the extent that he's tapping into that, is not wrong. I think there are always things that we can do internationally, but we shouldn't expect that if we do these things, we're going to have great outcomes. We may make things a little better. There are things that we can do at the international level, but not expect that everyone's going to be just like us.