It is easy to forget that early in Joe Biden’s presidency he made a bridge-building overture to Vladimir Putin. During the 2020 campaign, Biden barely mentioned Russia as a geopolitical rival to the US. China hogged all the attention. At the Geneva summit with his Russian counterpart in June 2021, the US president went to great lengths to massage Putin’s ego, even calling Russia a great power.
A few weeks later, Biden withdrew America’s remaining forces from Afghanistan in a debacle that threatened to define his presidency.
In retrospect, it is clear that the two seemingly unrelated events — Biden’s positive mood music towards Russia and his Afghanistan pullout — reinforced Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. The west, in Putin’s view, was unlikely to react any more decisively to his planned annexation of Ukraine than it had to Crimea in 2014.