As
Bashar al-Assad fell, Russian nationalist military bloggers turned on
the Kremlin. “Ten years of our presence,” fumed the “Two Majors”
Telegram channel to its more than one million subscribers, “dead Russian
soldiers, billions of spent roubles and thousands of tonnes of
ammunition, they must be compensated somehow.” Some didn’t shy away from
lambasting Vladimir Putin.
“The adventure in Syria, initiated by Putin personally, seems to be
coming to an end. And it ends ignominiously, like all other
‘geopolitical’ endeavours of the Kremlin strategist.” These weren’t
isolated incidents. Filter Labs, a data analytics company I collaborate
with, saw social media sentiment on Syria dip steeply as Assad fell.
It was in stark contrast to Putin’s silly claim
at his annual news conference last week that Russia had suffered no
defeat in Syria. Unlike social media, legacy media tried to walk the
Kremlin line, but even here there were splits. “You can bluff on the
international arena for a while – but make sure you don’t fall for your
own deceptions”, ran an op-ed in the broadsheet Kommersant,
penned by a retired colonel close to the military leadership. He then
used Syria as an example of how “in today’s world, victory is only
possible in a quick and fleeting war. If you effectively win in a matter
of days and weeks, but cannot quickly consolidate your success in
military and political terms, you will eventually lose no matter what
you do.” Vasily Gatov, a media analyst at the University of Southern
California, told me he thought it was a message from the general staff
to the Kremlin: be realistic about what we can achieve in Ukraine, too.
Assad’s
fall is not just a blow to Russia’s interests in the Middle East but to
the essence of Putin’s power, which has always been about perception
management. His early spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky once explained to me
how, when the Kremlin was weak domestically in the late 1990s and early
2000s, Russian leaders learned to dominate TV to create ersatz grandeur.
The Kremlin couldn’t really control the regional governors at that
point, but it could give the sense that the president ruled everything
by being omnipresent in the media. Since then, Putin has taken
perception management to the international stage, trying to tell a story
that he is leading a new generation of authoritarian regimes destined
to inherit the earth. But that image suddenly looks shaky. Now is the
time to apply more pressure before he can patch things up and project
his superpower movie once again.
Despite
Kremlin claims that all is dandy with the economy, Russians are
complaining that inflation is making their salaries worthless
Start
in Georgia, where protesters have been making a brave stand against the
pro-Russian government’s decision to cease integration with the EU. At
stake is Georgia being swallowed up in Moscow’s neocolonial sphere.
Greater Russian ascendancy allows Moscow to put a stranglehold over gas
transit pipelines to Europe and to manipulate access to Central Asia.
The aim of the protesters is to get enough people in the system to
abandon the ruling party and their de facto ruler, the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili.
The protests are starting to bear fruit. Some diplomats and officials
are defecting. The west can make it clear that the Georgian leaders are
pariahs by sanctioning the politicians, businesses and security
officials involved in the crackdowns.
Last
week, the UK government got on the right track by hitting five
officials with asset freezes and travel bans. The pro-Russian leadership
has to be made to look vulnerable for those below them to abandon ship
in enough numbers. The Kremlin failed in its attempt to use corruption
and propaganda to derail Moldova’s journey towards the EU in a recent referendum. Georgians deserve to have their European aspirations supported, too.
Meanwhile,
on the high seas, Europe has finally taken action against the Russian
shadow fleet that transports oil across the world and sells it at rates
above the limit set by the G7. The ships will now be stopped and boarded
if they are not properly insured. Eddie Fishman of Columbia University
argues this is the moment to cripple the Kremlin’s crucial oil revenues
by putting secondary sanctions
on entities that buy the above-price oil. That will scare off the
Indian and Emirati traders who carry on doing business with Russia and,
in turn, increase the stress on a Russian economy where business leaders
are already complaining the system is unsustainable. Despite Kremlin
claims that all is dandy with the economy, Russians aren’t buying it,
complaining online that inflation is making their salaries feel
worthless.
And though the Kremlin maintains
Russia and China are an alliance made in economic heaven, the reality is
more tenuous. Russian businesses are saying that Chinese banks will no
longer work with them now that Russian institutions have been
blacklisted by the US. Instead, they worry that the Chinese are offering
them “deeply suspicious” ways to move money – yet they have no choice
but to play along.
The
Kremlin will be more than aware of these complaints throughout society,
from military bloggers to business people. There are no signs of
democratic uprisings. Putin fears no elections. But it worries when
people don’t do as it commands. The Russian president often recalculates
when he sees that he can’t control perceptions and behaviours – thus,
he abandoned mobilisation efforts after the last attempts saw up to a
million young Russians flee the country.
As the
west increases pressure points on Russia, the aim is not some magical
regime change. The point is to make the leadership feel so unsure it
rethinks what it can get away with. For that, the pressure on Putin has
to come thick and fast, with one blow coming after another in unexpected
succession, unravelling the stories of international influence he has
spun. Ukraine is taking direct action: with drone strikes at military
production sites ever deeper within Russia and the spectacular assassination of a Russian general in the heart of Moscow. But its democratic allies can do much more by relearning the art of economic and political warfare.
Joe
Biden’s flawed approach was always to wait until after a Russian
crisis, and then let Putin recover and regroup. Can Donald Trump try
something more dynamic? Or will he believe Putin’s bluster even more
than Biden? The paradox would then be that the US believed in Putin’s
myth of imperviousness more than many Russians. The most important
“perception management” Vladimir Putin is banking on is the one aimed at
the White House itself.
How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge
Aides
kept meetings short and controlled access, top advisers acted as
go-betweens and public interactions became more scripted. The
administration denied Biden has declined.
President Biden in Berlin in October. SEBASTIAN GOLLNOW/ZUMA PRESS
During
the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively
across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a
fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local
reporter.
His
superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in
a minivan through the state’s cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy
campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to
contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign
appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years
his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband’s more
plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.
The message from Biden’s team was clear. “The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad,” LaRosa said.
To
adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they
told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior
Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful
secretaries such as Defense’s Lloyd Austin and Treasury’s Janet
Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders
had a hard time getting the president’s ear at key moments, including
ahead of the U.S.’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.
Senior
advisers were often put into roles that some administration officials
and lawmakers thought Biden should occupy, with people such as National
Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, senior counselor Steve Ricchetti and
National Economic Council head Lael Brainard and her predecessor
frequently in the position of being go-betweens for the president.
Press
aides who compiled packages of news clips for Biden were told by senior
staff to exclude negative stories about the president. The president
wasn’t talking to his own pollsters as surveys showed him trailing in
the 2024 race.
Biden and Jill Biden at a North Carolina campaign event on June 28, the day after the presidential debate.
Presidents
always have gatekeepers. But in Biden’s case, the walls around him were
higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers,
donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There
were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him
and limits around the sources of information he consumed.
Throughout
his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist
him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public. “They body him
to such a high degree,” a person who witnessed it said, adding that the
“hand holding” is unlike anything other recent presidents have had.
This
account of how the White House functioned with an aging leader at the
top of its organizational chart is based on interviews with nearly 50
people, including those who participated in or had direct knowledge of
the operations.
Many of those who criticized Biden’s insularity said his system nonetheless kept his agenda on track.
White
House spokesman Andrew Bates said Biden “earned the most accomplished
record of any modern commander in chief and rebuilt the middle class
because of his attention to policy details that impact millions of
lives.” Bates, who rejected the notion that Biden has declined, added
that the president has often solicited opinions from outside experts,
which has informed his policymaking.
He
said it is the job of senior White House staff to have high-level
meetings regularly and that they were executing Biden’s agenda at his
direction.
He
also said that staff alerted the president to “significant” negative
news stories. Bernal, via the White House press office, declined to
comment.
‘Good days and bad days’
The president’s slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur,
the special counsel who investigated Biden’s handling of classified
documents, the president couldn’t recall lines that his team discussed
with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as
where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average
person. Biden’s team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a
Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president’s fading
warble.
Biden,
now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers.
The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because
Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His
staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting
in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the
pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it.
The
structure was also designed to prevent Biden, an undisciplined public
speaker throughout his half-century political career, from making gaffes
or missteps that could damage his image, create political headaches or
upset the world order.
The
system put Biden at an unusual remove from cabinet secretaries, the
chairs of congressional committees and other high-ranking officials. It
also insulated him from the scrutiny of the American public.
Biden’s debate with Donald Trump on June 27 made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue.
The
strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden
stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and
unable to complete his thoughts on live television. Much of the
Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden
was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary.
Biden,
staffed with advisers since he became a senator at age 30, came to the
White House with a small team of fiercely loyal, long-serving aides who
knew him and Washington so well that they could be particularly
effective proxies. They didn’t tolerate criticism of Biden’s performance
or broader dissent within the Democratic Party, especially when it came
to the president’s decision to run for a second term.
Yet
a sign that the bruising presidential schedule needed to be adjusted
for Biden’s advanced age had arisen early on—in just the first few
months of his term. Administration officials noticed that the president
became tired if meetings went long and would make mistakes.
They
issued a directive to some powerful lawmakers and allies seeking
one-on-one time: The exchanges should be short and focused, according to
people who received the message directly from White House aides.
Ideally,
the meetings would start later in the day, since Biden has never been
at his best first thing in the morning, some of the people said. His
staff made these adjustments to limit potential missteps by Biden, the
people said. The president, known for long and rambling sessions, at
times pushed in the opposite direction, wanting or just taking more
time.
The White House denied that his schedule has been altered due to his age.
If
the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped
altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national
security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be
rescheduled. “He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so
we’re going to address this tomorrow,” the former aide recalled the
official saying.
While
it isn’t uncommon for politicians to want more time with the president
than they get, some Democrats felt Biden was unusually hard to reach.
That’s
what Rep. Adam Smith of Washington found when he tried to share his
concerns with the president ahead of the U.S. withdrawal from
Afghanistan in 2021. Smith, a Democrat who then chaired the powerful
House Armed Services Committee, was alarmed by what he viewed as overly
optimistic comments from Biden as the administration assembled plans for
the operation.
“I
was begging them to set expectations low,” said Smith, who had worked
extensively on the issue and harbored concerns about how the withdrawal
might go. He sought to talk to Biden directly to share his insights
about the region but couldn’t get on the phone with him, Smith said.
Taliban forces in Kabul after the U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.
After
the disastrous withdrawal, which left 13 U.S. service members and more
than 170 Afghans dead, Smith made a critical comment to the Washington
Post about the administration lacking a “clear-eyed view” of the
U.S.-backed Ashraf Ghani government’s durability. It was among comments
that triggered an angry phone call from Secretary of State Antony
Blinken, who ended up getting an earful from the frustrated chairman.
Shortly after, Smith got an apologetic call from Biden. It was the only
phone call Biden made to Smith in his four years in office, Smith said.
“The
Biden White House was more insulated than most,” Smith said. “I spoke
with Barack Obama on a number of occasions when he was president and I
wasn’t even chairman of the committee.”
Rep.
Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, said his interactions with the White House in the past two
years were primarily focused on the reauthorization of a vital section
of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that authorizes broad
national security surveillance powers. Biden’s senior advisers and other
top administration officials worked with Himes on the issue, and he
praised the collaboration.
But
Biden wasn’t part of the conversation. “I really had no personal
contact with this president. I had more personal contact with Obama,
which is sort of strange because I was a lot more junior,” said Himes,
who took office in 2009. Congress extended the surveillance authority
for two years instead of the administration’s goal of five years.
Bates
said that in every administration, some in Washington would prefer to
spend more time with the president and that Biden put significant effort
into promoting his legislative agenda.
One
lawmaker who did get one-on-one time with Biden noticed that the
president lacked stamina and heavily relied on his staff: Sen. Joe
Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat-turned-independent who held up
chunks of Biden’s legislative agenda during the first half of Biden’s
term. Manchin said the job required a level of energy that he wasn’t
sure Biden had been able to sustain.
“I
just thought that maybe the president just lost that fight,” Manchin
said in an interview. “The ability to continue to stay on, just grind
it, grind it, grind it.”
Instead
of Biden directing follow up, Manchin noticed that Biden’s staff played
a much bigger role driving his agenda than he had experienced in other
administrations. Manchin referred to them as the “eager beavers”—a group
that included then-White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain. “They were
going, ‘I’ll take care of that,’ ” Manchin said.
Klain,
who was chief of staff for Biden’s first two years in office, said that
“the agenda and pace” of the White House was at the “president’s
direction and leadership.”
Dealing with advisers
Interactions
between Biden and many of his cabinet members were relatively
infrequent and often tightly scripted. At least one cabinet member
stopped requesting calls with the president, because it was clear that
such requests wouldn’t be welcome, a former senior cabinet aide said.
One
top cabinet member met one-on-one with the president at most twice in
the first year and rarely in small groups, another former senior cabinet
aide said.
Multiple
former senior cabinet aides described a top-down dynamic in which the
White House would issue decisions and expect cabinet agencies to carry
them out, rather than making cabinet secretaries active participants in
the policymaking process. Some of them said it was hard for them to
discern to what degree Biden was insulated because of his age versus his
preference for a powerful inner circle.
Bates
said Biden has daily conversations with members of his cabinet. Several
cabinet secretaries contacted the Journal at the White House’s request
to attest to the smooth operations between their agencies and the White
House. They said Biden would call them individually on the phone when
seeking information or to give direction.
“I
spoke with him whenever we needed his guidance or his help,” said Denis
McDonough, Biden’s Secretary of Veterans Affairs and former chief of
staff to Obama. “A lot of times it was him reaching out to us.”
Most often, however, they dealt with the president’s advisers, not the president himself, some of them said.
“If
I had an issue or I needed attention on something, I had multiple
avenues to explore to raise the issue,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack. “You don’t always have to raise the issue with the president.”
Vilsack,
who also served as the agriculture secretary under Obama, said that
presidents should primarily get involved when there’s a dispute between
agencies.
Obama
would often meet with smaller groups of cabinet members to hash out a
policy debate, former administration officials said.
But
that often wasn’t the experience under Biden’s administration. Instead,
cabinet members most often met alone or with a member of the
president’s senior staff, including Brainard, the economic adviser, or
National Security Adviser Sullivan. The senior adviser would then bring
the issue to the president and report back, former administration
officials said.
Former administration officials said it often didn’t seem like Biden had his finger on the pulse.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen had an arm’s length relationship with Biden.
Traditionally,
presidents have more frequent interactions with certain cabinet
secretaries—often Treasury, Defense and State—than others.
But
Treasury Secretary Yellen had an arm’s length relationship with the
president for much of the administration. She was part of the economics
team that regularly briefed the president, but one-on-one discussions
were more rare, and she typically dealt with the NEC or with the
president’s advisers rather than Biden directly, according to people
familiar with the interactions.
Some current and former administration officials said they would have expected a closer relationship between the two.
Bates,
the White House spokesman, said Biden “deeply values Secretary Yellen’s
expertise and counsel” and is “grateful for her service.” The Treasury
Department declined to comment.
Defense
Secretary Austin also saw his close relationship with Biden grow more
distant over the course of the administration, with Austin’s regular
access to Biden becoming increasingly rare in the past two years, people
familiar with the relationship said.
During
the first half of the administration, Austin was one of the cabinet
members who would regularly attend Biden’s presidential daily briefing
on a rotational basis each week. That briefing would be followed with a
routine one-on-one in which Austin and Biden would meet personally
behind closed doors.
Officials
familiar with these meetings said they helped cabinet members to
understand the commander in chief’s intentions directly, instead of
being filtered through others, such as Sullivan, the national security
adviser.
But
in the past two years—a period when the wars in Ukraine and Gaza
demanded the president’s attention—Austin’s invitation to the briefing
came less frequently, to the point where the one-on-one meeting was
seldom scheduled. When the one-on-one meetings did take place, they were
more typically virtual meetings, not in-person. Still, Austin could
always get an unscheduled meeting with the president if he needed it.
Bates
disputed that there was any decline in regular contact or attendance to
presidential daily briefings, adding that Austin “is a fixture in these
briefings and they speak often.”
A Pentagon spokesman said Biden frequently called Austin on the phone for matters that varied from urgent to lower in priority.
Biden
has a close relationship with Secretary of State Blinken, whom he has
known for decades, former administration officials said.
Biden with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in March.
Over
four years, Biden held nine full cabinet meetings—three in 2021, two in
2022, three in 2023 and just one this year. In their first terms, Obama
held 19 and Trump held 25, according to data compiled by former CBS
News correspondent Mark Knoller.
Early
in his vice presidency during the Obama administration, Biden sought to
gather cabinet leaders once a week, saying in a speech that the synergy
brought about by the regular meetings made the government more
competent.
The
White House said Biden meets with smaller groups of his agency heads
and that the contemporary work environment means full cabinet meetings
can be fewer and far between.
In
the fall of 2023, Biden faced a major test when Hur, the special
counsel, wanted to interview him. The president wanted to do it, and his
top aides felt that his willingness to sit down with investigators set
up a favorable contrast with Trump, who stonewalled the probe into why
classified documents appeared at Mar-a-Lago, according to people
familiar with the sessions.
The
prep sessions took about three hours a day for about a week ahead of
the interview, according to a person familiar with the preparation.
During these sessions, Biden’s energy levels were up and down. He
couldn’t recall lines that his team had previously discussed with him,
the person said.
A
White House official pushed back on the notion that Biden’s age showed
in prep, saying that the concerns that arose during those sessions were
related to Biden’s tendency to over-share.
The
actual interview didn’t go well. Transcripts showed multiple blunders,
including that Biden didn’t initially recall that in prep sessions he
had been shown his own handwritten memo arguing against a surge of
troops in Afghanistan.
The
report—one of just a few lengthy interviews with Biden over the past
four years—concluded with a recommendation that Biden not be prosecuted
for having classified documents in his home because a jury was likely to
view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor
memory.”
Insulated on campaign
Biden’s
team also insulated him on the campaign trail. In the summer of 2023,
one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden’s
re-election bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him
that attendees shouldn’t expect to have a free ranging
question-and-answer session with the president. Instead, the organizer
was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Biden
would answer.
At
some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on
notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even
with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who
knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.
Some
donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of
decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the
term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused
on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how
former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their
presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.
These
aides, which include Annie Tomasini and Ashley Williams, were often
with the president as he traveled and stayed within earshot or eye
distance, the people said. They would often repeat basic instructions to
him, such as where to enter or exit a stage.
The White House said that the work by staff to guide Biden through events is standard for high-level officials.
Biden with aide Annie Tomasini in April.
Biden with aide Ashley Williams in September.
People
who witnessed it felt differently. In the past, aides performing these
duties were often on their phones, chatting with other people or
fetching something from a car or a computer nearby, they said.
The
president’s team of pollsters also had limited access to Biden,
according to people familiar with the president’s polling. The key
advisers have famously had the president’s ear in most past White
Houses.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.
By
the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren’t talking to the president about
their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.
Biden’s
pollsters didn’t meet with him in person and saw little evidence that
the president was personally getting the data that they were sending
him, according to the people.
People
close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden’s
core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could
sift through the information and present it to the president.
Bates said that Biden stayed abreast of polling data.
But
this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden
described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup
when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate
consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn’t getting an
unvarnished look at his standing in the race.
Those
fears intensified on July 11, when Biden’s top advisers met behind
closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a
road map for Biden’s victory. The message from the advisers was so
disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden
nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden
directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce
what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from
bad information. Donilon didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Biden campaigned in Detroit on July 12.
On
July 13, Biden held an uncomfortable call with a group of Democratic
lawmakers called the New Democrat Coalition, aimed at reassuring them
about his ability to stay in the race.
The
president told participants that polling showed he was doing fine. He
became angry when challenged, according to lawmakers on the call. At one
point, Biden looked up and abruptly told the group he had to go to
church. Some lawmakers on the call believed someone behind the camera
was shutting it down.
Biden dropped out of the race eight days later.
Gordon Lubold and Erich Schwartzel contributed to this article.
Interesting tidbits I found, mainly for my own entertainment. I copied some sites, since after some time, I find they are gone.
Erdekessegek amit talaltam, foleg a magam szorakoztatasara. Nehany oldalt masoltam, mert egy ido utan eltunnek.
