MOSCOW, January 20. / TASS /. Inaugural US President Joseph Biden will use confrontational rhetoric against Moscow for his domestic political goals, but this will not necessarily be fully backed up by appropriate actions, Director for scientific work of the Valdai International Discussion Club Fyodor Lukyanov told TASS on Thursday.
Lukyanov noted that the United States is now in a difficult socio-political state, in conditions of "the highest degree of polarization" of society, and the solution of this problem will be decisive for the activities of the new American administration. "Biden and his team, ideally, need to make a lot of effort to unite the country and direct it to some more or less shared course," he said . Thus, Washington's foreign policy priorities will also be completely subordinated to the tasks of domestic policy.
As part of this logic, Biden will try to find a means of using rather aggressive, ideologized rhetoric against Moscow. "Biden will, of course, choose a confrontational line. Russia as an anti-example, as a symbol of everything that the progressive Biden administration is fighting against, fits very well. Therefore, I think that at least the rhetoric will be very unfavorable for us, and the question is - how we will react," he said. "The foreign policy slogans that are now being voiced, from the point of view of Biden's team, should reinforce the authority and legitimacy of the president and the Democratic Party within the United States. That is, the ideas of strengthening democracy around the world and combating anti-liberal tendencies are now not so much a desire to change the world as a desire to influence external arguments for solving internal problems," said the expert. Nevertheless, loud statements from the White House will not necessarily lead to real action. "I think that US foreign policy will be very militant in words in just such a liberal transformational direction, but rather cautious and, perhaps, not even very active in practice, because the world situation does not allow, and resources are still not so there are many, and there are enough internal problems. And here the most important thing for external partners is to distinguish rhetoric from real resolve," Lukyanov stressed.