Raymond Seitz
MILESTONES OF DIPLOMACY
Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century
By David Reynolds (Allen Lane / The Penguin Press 496pp £25)

Summits make such a good topic for historical review that it's a surprise no one has done it before. It took the felicitous convergence of David Reynolds (the noted Cambridge professor), Blakeway Productions and the commissioning arm of the BBC to launch the project. The television series covers three summits: Munich in 1938, Vienna in 1961, and Geneva in 1985. But Reynolds recognised that three summits do not a book make, so he added three more: Yalta in 1945, Moscow in 1972, and Camp David in 1978. The result is an anthology of top-level meetings which are milestones in twentieth-century diplomacy.

Summitry as a form of political art is a relatively recent phenomenon. The 1520 encounter between Henry VIII and François I on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and Napoleon's meeting with Alexander I at Tilsit in 1807, qualify as antecedents. But as a general rule, heads of state in the past wisely stayed away from each other. Nowadays, meetings between or among national leaders are commonplace, and even institutionalised, as with the European Council or the G-8. And every autumn, when the UN General Assembly gathers, you can hardly swing a cat in New York without hitting a president of something.

A meeting of leaders, however, does not constitute a summit. The special ingredient is that the participants are essentially seen as adversaries, and at a first-rate summit, the adversaries are capable of destroying each other. Summits are strategic events, meant to explore and possibly settle grand issues. They are, by their very nature, dramatic, and the exercise of 'personal diplomacy', or the indulgence of political vanity, in such circumstances is a risky business for any leader. A summit raises expectations and galvanises bureaucracies, and when it's all done the only court of appeal is public opinion.

As Reynolds points out, the aeroplane made summits possible, and weapons of mass destruction made them necessary. Neville Chamberlain flew to see Hitler three times in September 1938. Desperate for peace in any case, Chamberlain felt his fears heightened by military experts who predicted London would be obliterated by the Luftwaffe (Reynolds coyly mentions that Chamberlain wasn't the last prime minister to get it wrong about WMD). This initial modern summit illustrated all the dangers of the diplomatic tool. Chamberlain was ill prepared. He relied on Hitler's interpreter. He was so committed to success, and so politically exposed, that he allowed himself to believe Hitler was sane and trustworthy, even with all evidence to the contrary. And when he finally returned to Britain with his umbrella, his flimsy piece of paper and his prognostication of 'peace in our time', he was awash in public adulation. Six months later his disastrous historical reputation was sealed for ever.

Not a good start. Despite this, however, Winston Churchill was an avid practitioner of summitry. In fact, 'summit' was another one of his contributions to our political vocabulary. Like many political leaders, Churchill believed his powers of persuasion were irresistible ('If only I could dine with Stalin once a week, there would be no trouble'). And Roosevelt was certain he could charm Stalin into universal peace. But summits are not personality pageants, and it was the shrewd, steely, laconic Stalin who seemed most in control at Yalta. This controversial meeting of wartime allies revealed another vulnerability of summitry: if leaders are anxious for a 'successful' outcome, they are inclined to fudge the hard issues. Poland was such a fudge, long regretted and criticised afterwards.

The Vienna summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev taught more lessons in summit diplomacy. Good health is a prerequisite. Kennedy was in severe pain from his back and buzzing on a cocktail of drugs for other ailments (and at Yalta, FDR was terminally ill and Churchill none too well himself). More importantly, get-acquainted sessions, as opposed to a substantive agenda, are not a firm foundation for a summit meeting, but this is what Kennedy wanted. The President, however, arrived fresh from the Bay of Pigs debacle, and his support at home had wobbled. The lesson here is that you should only go to a summit with your political flanks protected. Khrushchev - ever the crude, bullying peasant - savaged the rich, Harvard-educated sophisticate (as Kennedy later confessed, 'He beat the hell out of me'). Assessing the new president as weak and naïve, Khrushchev subsequently approved the building of the wall in Berlin and then spirited short-range missiles into Cuba. Summits can lead to miscalculation as much as clarification.

The Moscow summit in May 1972 was a watershed in the superpower relationship. Reynolds is critical of the 'ruthless, paranoid style' of both Nixon and Kissinger, and indeed the relationship between the two was bizarre (Nixon: 'I don't trust Henry, but I can use him'). But these two leaders, despite their tangled webs of intrigue, engineered the American opening to China and transformed the international strategic balance. Leonid Brezhnev, still not in complete command of the Kremlin, was therefore anxious to stabilise the Soviet position in Europe and with the United States (so anxious that the American mining of North Vietnamese ports just before the summit did not lead to its cancellation). At the carefully prepared meeting, Nixon and Brezhnev signed SALT I, the first superpower treaty to limit nuclear weapons, as well as a Basic Principles document, which essentially recognised US-USSR equality and sanctified 'détente'. Both accords were controversial in America, but Moscow surely would have led to other substantive summits had not Nixon committed political suicide at Watergate.

In the early autumn of 1978, the intellectually rigorous and slightly messianic Jimmy Carter held Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat hostage at Camp David for two weeks. With the American president bicycling back and forth between the cabins of the Israeli and Egyptian leaders, and occasionally worried that one of Sadat's advisors might murder the Egyptian president, this was hardly a typical exercise in summitry. But each summit has its own dynamic, and the longer Camp David went on the more obvious it became that the political consequences of failure were greater than the political consequences of success. The result was a specific agreement on Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, and dismantlement of settlements there, as well as a rickety framework document for Middle East peace. Camp David was a close-run thing, full of ups and downs, and, as often happens with summits, the agreements started to come off the rails almost as soon as they were signed. But, for its time, Camp David was an extraordinary tale of high-risk summitry.

The author seems to regard the 1985 Geneva meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev as the loftiest peak in the range of summits. Here we had the right leaders at the right time - Reagan the arch Cold Warrior who nonetheless abhorred the madness of nuclear deterrence, and Gorbachev the gambling reformer who saw the arms race as breaking the back of his country. Reynolds also rightly heaps praise on George Shultz, who gave policy shape to Reagan's political instincts. Geneva was largely an ideological punch-up, but it had two important results. First, Reagan and Gorbachev concluded they could trust each other; and, second, it led to a series of summits which established the basis for the peaceful end of the Cold War. And Reynolds therefore concludes that summits, though fraught with danger, ought not to be seen as one-off events but rather as catalytic points in a continuing, broader process of diplomatic relations.

David Reynolds writes with pace and verve, and while his effort to impose some academic order on these different stories of summitry is not wholly convincing, he has given us a fine book which can make one nostalgic for an earlier, more coherent world.