A transformed global context and the rise of China put any decisions made at Biden’s meeting with Putin into perspective
Joe Biden’s meeting with Vladimir Putin in Geneva looked like a summit, sounded like a summit, and in some genuine senses really was a summit. But it was not an east-west superpower summit in the 20th-century sense. It was a bilateral meeting between the leaders of two important countries whose relations are possibly more difficult today than they were in the cold war. Yet life on Earth did not seem to hang in the balance yesterday, as it sometimes could do back then.
Throughout its history Russia has often been simultaneously strong and weak, at home and abroad. Now, in a century marked by growing Chinese power and the deep polarisation of its domestic politics, something similar can be said of the United States, too. Relative decline has not made either country less suspicious of the other. Perhaps the most significant thing about their meeting was therefore that it occurred at all. But these two countries no longer bestride the globe.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist