After I Leave, I'll Send You a Cup of Joe

Less than a month after U.S. President Barack Obama showered Russian President Dmitry Medvedev with smiles and delivered an inspiring speech to graduates of a Moscow university, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Georgia and Ukraine and delivered a harsh assessment of Russia’s place in the world, a realpolitik shadow cast by Obama’s sunshine.

“It’s a very difficult thing to deal with, loss of empire,” Biden said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.  “This country, Russia, is in a very different circumstance than it has been at any time in the last 40 years, or longer.” Russia’s population is dying, its economy is flailing, and its leaders are “clinging to something in the past,” Biden said, adding that the future looks very bleak indeed for Russia.

Biden’s interview immediately raised Kremlin hackles. “The question that arises is: who sets the foreign policy of the U.S.—the president or members of his team?” asked Russian presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko, who added that Moscow’s current financial woes, as well as those of the rest of the world, are the result of “short-sighted and even adventurist economic measures in the U.S. during the presidency of George Bush Jr.”

“We think the attempts from within the administration to pull us all back into the past like Biden has done are abnormal,” said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. “It is as if his interview was rewritten from the speeches of those in the administration of George Bush.”

Russian media suggested that  Biden’s statements were due to his notorious reputation for bluntness, or that he was trying to pacify conservatives, some of whom felt Obama treaded too softly during his July visit to Moscow. Regardless, experts called the unexpected change in tone a reality check for Russia’s leaders.

“These statements make one ponder whether the term ‘resetting’ is adequately understood in Russia,” Carnegie Center director Dmitry Trenin told Kommersant. “For example, the term is understood [here] as a willingness to agree with the Russian point of view on the situation in the near abroad, which is wishful thinking.”

Hillary Clinton, originator of the reset button gaffe (the button mistranslated “reset” as “overload”), tried to cool the rhetoric. “We still consider Russia a great power,” she said a day after Biden’s interview was published.

In fact, for many in Russia, Biden voiced, albeit undiplomatically, what they have been talking about for a long while, that Russia’s leaders need a reality check. “Rational evaluation of ourselves is key in today’s politics,” wrote Novaya Gazeta (the oppositionist newspaper jointly owned by Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Lebedev). “Myths that have flourished in recent years have resulted in ambitious but unrealistic development strategies. A lot depends on the ability of decision-making politicians to audit their strategies and how well they have been executed.”

Even some balanced voices that tend to avoid overt criticism of the Kremlin are embracing Biden. “It’s good that he said what he said,” wrote Vedomosti on its editorial page. “At least nobody will have any illusions, whether in Moscow or in Washington.”