Joe Biden admits the awkwardness of US actions towards France | News from Germany about Europe | DW

US President Joe Biden admitted that Washington behaved “awkwardly” during the formation of the new defense alliance AUKUS with the participation of the UK and Australia. He stated this at a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, which took place on Friday, October 29, at the French Embassy in the Vatican. Tensions have erupted recently between Washington and Paris after Australia, in light of the AUKUS trilateral partnership, announced it had terminated a € 56 billion submarine agreement with the French company Naval Group.

France and the United States in recent weeks have implemented a number of concrete measures to strengthen cooperation, Macron said, in turn, expressing the hope that such situations will no longer be allowed in the future. “We have clarified what European defense is and that it is absolutely related to NATO. We have clarified what European sovereignty means and its importance for international security,” the French president said.

Biden and Macron reaffirmed their support for the EU-US security dialogue, the White House said. Topics discussed at the talks also included Russia, China, energy and nuclear issues, according to a White House press pool report.

Pope spoke with Biden for over an hour

Earlier in the day, Joe Biden met with Pope Francis. The meeting touched upon the problems of combating the pandemic and overcoming the climate crisis, the press service of the White House said. The audience lasted 1 hour and 15 minutes, which is considered a record-breaking time. Biden is the second Catholic president in US history after John F. Kennedy. The meeting between Biden and the pontiff was preceded by a visit to the Vatican by US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at the end of June. Then the foundations were laid for the normalization of relations between the United States and the Vatican after sharp disagreements that arose during the years of Donald Trump’s presidency.

Biden arrived in Europe on Friday night to attend the G20 Leaders Meeting in Rome and the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow. His first stop on this tour was the Vatican. The G20 summit will take place in Rome on October 30-31.

See also:

• History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Face to face

  Joe Biden became the fifth President of the United States to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In total, the number of different summits between the leaders of the USSR and Russia and the presidents of the United States has exceeded a hundred, and some of them have gone down in the history of world politics. The first face-to-face meeting of Biden and Putin in Geneva in June 2021 was not a breakthrough, but the very fact that it took place is important, observers note.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  First visit to the USA

  The first Soviet leader to pay an official visit to the United States was Nikita Khrushchev. In September 1959, he met with US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was not possible to reach an agreement on any of the discussed problems. The return visit did not take place because of the scandal with the American U2 spy plane shot down in May 1960 near Sverdlovsk.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Agreed to the wall

  Khrushchev’s negotiations with the new American President John F. Kennedy took place on June 4, 1961, at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. The main topic was the fate of Berlin and Germany as a whole. The parties fiercely defended their positions and failed to agree on key items of the agenda. Two months later, the Berlin Wall divided the city into eastern and western sections.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Discovering Moscow

  Richard Nixon became the first US president to pay an official visit to the USSR. The negotiations held in May 1972 with the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev marked the beginning of a new stage in relations, which was called “detente”. In Moscow, the Agreement on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT-1) and the Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM) were signed.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  On the eve of the war in Afghanistan

  The entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan in December 1979 caused a new deterioration in Soviet-American relations. Six months earlier, Brezhnev had met in Vienna with the new President of the United States, Jimmy Carter. The negotiations resulted in the signing of the Treaty on the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (SALT-2), which, among other things, limited the deployment of nuclear weapons in outer space.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  The end of the “evil empire”

  Relations between Mikhail Gorbachev and US President Ronald Reagan initially went wrong. After the first meeting in Geneva in 1985, one christened the other a “dinosaur”, the second called a colleague a “die-hard Bolshevik.” That did not prevent them from holding several meetings and signing a number of important documents in the field of disarmament. Arriving in Moscow in 1988, Reagan declared that he no longer considered the USSR an “evil empire.”

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Seasickness summit

  A two-day meeting between Mikhail Gorbachev and the new American leader, George W. Bush, took place in 1989 in Malta aboard the Soviet cruise ship “Maxim Gorky”, docked in the port of Valletta. Despite a strong storm, the summit opened a fundamentally new stage in relations between the two countries. In particular, for the first time in history, a joint press conference was held between the two leaders.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Point in the Cold War

  The meeting of the first Russian President Boris Yeltsin with George W. Bush in the United States in the winter of 1992 summed up the 46-year Cold War. A declaration was signed stating that Russia and the United States no longer view each other as possible adversaries. A year later, in Moscow, politicians signed the Treaty on the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START II).

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Friend bill

  Boris Yeltsin and the next President of the United States, Bill Clinton, were friendly. They met several times. In 1997 in Helsinki, during the last summit of the two leaders, Clinton persuaded Yeltsin not to impede NATO expansion, promising to admit Russia to the G7, promote WTO accession, and help restructure Russia’s debt in the Paris Club of creditors.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  On Russia’s accession to NATO

  In 2000, Bill Clinton came to Moscow, where he met with the new President of Russia, Vladimir Putin. No important documents were signed. The main sensation was voiced by Putin many years later. In an interview with American film director Oliver Stone, the Russian leader said that he suggested that Clinton consider the option of Russia’s joining NATO, and he was not against it.

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  He is the king

  In November 2001, Putin became the first foreign leader to visit not only the ranch of US President George W. Bush in Texas, but also attended a closed CIA briefing for the head of the White House. At the same time, the cooling in relations between Russia and the United States began precisely under Bush Jr., who already in 2006 declared: “Putin is no longer a democrat. He is a tsar. We have lost him.”

• 

  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  Burger reboot

  A brief period of warming in Russian-American relations fell on Dmitry Medvedev’s presidency in the Russian Federation. In September 2009, he visited the United States, visited Twitter headquarters and started his microblogging, received the latest iPhone from Apple CEO Steve Jobs and had breakfast with US President Barack Obama at a burger shop. And on April 8, 2010 in Prague, Medvedev and Obama signed the START III Treaty.

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  History of the summits of the leaders of the USSR and Russia with the presidents of the United States

  It blew cold

  Soon after Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin, a new deterioration in Russian-American relations began: from 2012 to 2018, the presidents of the two countries did not make official visits. During the bilateral meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Helsinki in 2018, not only no agreements were signed, but not even a joint final statement.

  Author: Vitaly Kropman

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