“A well-intentioned leader convinced of his rightness, whose confidence in his powers of persuasion bordered on hubris. . . A leader whose rhetoric became increasingly extravagant and deceptive, yet whose apparent naivety may have been the outward face of a man who has gone too far to turn back. Who does this remind us of?”

So writes David Reynolds, describing Tony Blair’s behaviour at his disastrous summit meetings with George W Bush. And the memory it stirs? Anthony Eden during Suez? Perhaps: but yet more strongly, Neville Chamberlain at Munich: another meeting “at the summit” that was to cast an equally long shadow.

Some of us have spent all our lives in the shadow of such summits, and in this fine study Reynolds dissects six of them. There was Munich in 1938, which, though it postponed war, made clear its inevitability. There was Yalta in 1945, which set the framework for the peace. There was the Kennedy-Khrushchev encounter in Vienna in 1961 that paved the way for the Cuban missile crisis. There was the meeting between Nixon and Brezhnev in Moscow in 1972, that established a grumbling but stable coexistence between the superpowers. There was the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Geneva in 1985, which ensured, as Reynolds nicely puts it, that the cold war ended “neither with a bang nor a whimper, but a handshake”. To these he adds the Camp David meeting between Sadat and Begin under the auspices of Jimmy Carter in 1978, which does not quite fit with the rest, but is another example of what summitry can, or more often cannot, do.

Reynolds makes a convincing case that this era of summitry was unique. There had been summits before (Henry VIII’s Field of the Cloth of Gold) but difficulty of travel made them infrequent. Later heads of state have met often enough – probably too often – but never to settle matters of quite such moment. The summits analysed by Reynolds could determine whether the world would remain at peace or topple over into a war that might destroy mankind; and their protagonists knew it.

These summits were made possible only by air travel. Reynolds reminds us how innovative and courageous was Chamberlain’s decision to fly to meet Hitler, and how effectively it transformed negotiations. It worked: but for Chamberlain, there would almost certainly have been war in 1938 rather than 1939. On whether that would or would not have been a good thing, the jury is still out.

What Chamberlain began, Churchill continued. Within days of becoming prime minister, he was flying to beg the French government not to surrender. In 1941, he held his first “summit” with Roosevelt to cement their “special relationship”. A year later he flew to Moscow to reassure Stalin that the West was still a reliable ally. None of these tasks could be left to diplomats. The system worked, as did further meetings at Tehran and, after a fashion, Yalta.

By 1945, it was generally accepted that frequent meetings between heads of governments were desirable, if not essential. The ice age that set in for a decade after 1947 was increasingly seen on both sides to be nonviable, and a meeting at the summit as the only way of thawing it. Once the ice was broken by Eisenhower, such meetings became a regular element in relations between the superpowers, and to describe them, as Reynolds quite brilliantly does, is to tell the story of those relations.

Reynolds is a historian, and performs the main duty of a historian: to provide a readable narrative. He describes the rationale for the meetings; the political circumstances; the personalities; and the physical pressures on them – the fatigue, the excess of food and drink, the press howling for results. At Yalta, Roosevelt was moribund, and after arrival by sea at Malta had endured a seven-hour flight and a four-hour drive over mountain roads. At his Geneva meeting with Khrushchev, Kennedy was in constant pain from his back and kept going only by drugs.

But behind the narrative lies a muscular analytic mind. Reynolds divides his summits into the personal, the plenary and the progressive; their objectives into appeasement, containment, détente or transformation; their process into preparation, negotiation or implementation. Personal meetings could be disastrous if they led to such crass misjudgments as resulted between Chamberlain and Hitler; but they could be remarka-bly successful if the “chemistry” worked as well as it did between Gorbachev and Reagan. Plenary meetings, where the principals were seconded by officials as at Yalta in 1945 or at Moscow in 1972, were valuable in consolidating gains and eliminating misunderstandings. Nevertheless, wishful thinking led Churchill and Roosevelt to misjudge Stalin badly at Yalta, while the agreements reached by Nixon and Kissinger at Moscow were impossible to sell to public opinion at home.

As a “progressive” summit intended to pave the way for further agreements, the Moscow meeting worked not too badly; while the Gorbachev-Reagan contact in Geneva, though it settled nothing, proved to be the first step in a decade-long process that was to end the cold war. But it did so because both protagonists shared an entirely impossible ideal. They were concerned neither to appease grievances, like Chamberlain, nor to “contain” an adversary, like Kennedy, but to transform the whole international scene. Both Reagan and Gorbachev believed that “we cannot go on like this”, and trusted one another; so, in spite of their disagreements, and opposition from their officials, they, and Reagan’s successors, were able to reach an agreement that astonished the world.

The same messianic belief was shared by Blair and Bush, an account of whose meetings constitutes a melancholy epilogue to this excellent book. They also believed that their mission was one of “transformation” and were supremely confident, in spite of the doubts of their advisers, that they could achieve it. They did: we are still trying to put the pieces back together.

Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the 20th Century by David Reynolds
Allen Lane £25 pp512
Buy the book here at the offer price of £22.50 (inc p&p)

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