With the full-scale media meltdown of 2018’s Helsinki summit at the top of everyone’s minds, the highly anticipated first meeting between US president Joe Biden and Russian president Vladimir Putin has finally come and gone. Just as in 2018, commentators scrambled to overanalyze banalities and play body language expert, only this time in the opposite direction from three years ago, heaping praise on Biden for supposedly dominating Putin and reclaiming America’s collective, metaphorical masculinity. America is, after all, back.

One of Biden’s zingers during his post-summit presser was particularly interesting. After candidly admitting his staff regularly decide for him in advance which reporters to take questions from (“as usual, folks, they gave me a list of the people I’m going to call on”), Biden took his first question, the beginning of a series of demands from press corps hawks to explain if he was being aggressive enough, and whether he could go further.

Asked what he had “threatened” Putin with given the Kremlin’s prior election meddling and this year’s Russian-attributed SolarWinds hack, Biden reminded the reporter that he had already retaliated against those very things just two months ago, before warning Putin the global esteem he covets will be undermined by such behavior: