In the public imagination, a “summit” is a meeting between the political leaders of two states, with those between the United States and the Soviet Union seen as the most important. Yet one of the most interesting conclusions of David Reynolds’s compellingly written book is that these “personal” summits do not succeed. In a work of great originality, Reynolds sets out an analytical structure, considers six important summit meetings between 1938 and 1985, and concludes that only one of them had the desired result. The history of the political summit – truly a triumph of hope over experience – arises from the conviction of leaders that if only they can meet face to face with their opposite number, something can be worked out: charm will triumph. And time after time, the result was, at worst, disaster – as at Munich in 1938 – but more frequently the unravelling of hopes. Only one summit, that of Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in Geneva in 1985, is seen by Reynolds as a success, thanks to forward planning.

Reynolds defines summitry as a form of dialogue between states which is conducted at the highest level. Taken thus, it has been happening throughout recorded human history. In earlier times, when journeys between states was time-consuming and dangerous, the host had a higher status than the visitor. (When, in 1929, the first summit meeting between the British and American heads of government took place, it was the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who travelled to Washington to meet President Herbert Hoover, while, in 1938, it was Neville Chamberlain who went to Germany to meet Adolf Hitler.) Summitry is really a twentieth-century development, “made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction, and made into household news by the mass media of newsreels and television”. Reynolds’s classical period of summitry as intimate business meetings between a small number of heads of government is restricted to the half-century between the late 1930s and the late 1980s: thereafter the fundamental transformation in means of communication rendered summits much less necessary.

Reynolds presents six dramatic case studies: Munich 1938, with Chamberlain and Hitler; Yalta 1945, with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin; Vienna 1961, with Kennedy and Khrushchev; Moscow 1972, with Nixon and Brezhnev; Camp David 1978, with Begin, Sadat and Carter; and Geneva 1985, with Gorbachev and Reagan. Reynolds’s treatment of Munich is gripping. The hubris and the blinkers are familiar; it is the detail that makes the story almost unbelievable. He quotes from a private letter of October 1937 in which Chamberlain wrote of “the far-reaching plans which I have for the appeasement of Europe & Asia and for the ultimate check to the mad armaments race”; indeed, as Chamberlain wrote to his sisters, “I could hardly have moved a pebble: now I have only to raise a finger & the whole face of Europe is changed”. In grandiose aspirations, in any case, he and Hitler were not so ill-matched. But Chamberlain was almost wholly ill-prepared. He kept the Foreign Office, including his Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, at arm’s length, very few preparations were made, and he did not even take his own interpreter and record-keeper with him, thereby rendering himself dependent on the Germans. By the end, his whole sense of self was tied up with success – a state of affairs that almost guarantees ultimate defeat.

The failure of Munich to avert war can be compared to the success of the 1985 Geneva summit and the subsequent summit meetings, thanks to which the two superpowers for the first time agreed to reduce their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. First, the two countries were roughly comparable in military strength, and over the period between 1985 and 1988, mutual trust developed between the two leaders. Thorough preparations were made; the US Secretary of State, George Schulz, had the Washington bureaucracy behind him; and the lower as well as the upper levels of the two sides worked together: Schulz and the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, made a formidable team. The path to success was neither clear nor unencumbered, but the episode highlights the requirement that both sides, not just one, must strongly desire a successful outcome, as was not the case at Munich.

Reynolds sets out a typology of summits as part of his effort to understand why some succeed but most fail. There are personal summits, with an emphasis on the encounter between the two leaders, as at Munich and Vienna. There are plenary summits, where the personal encounters are balanced and supplemented by specialist advisers, and the participants also try to resolve substantial problems, such as Yalta and Camp David. There are progressive summits, where there are elements of both personal and plenary summits, but in which the meeting is seen as part of a series, both between leaders and among lower-level specialists: Moscow 1972 almost fitted the criteria, but Nixon and Kissinger were too devious for it to be a success.

And now there is what Reynolds calls “institutionalised summitry”, in which groups of national leaders meet at regular intervals backed up by a huge bureaucratic infrastructure. It has replaced “classical summitry” largely because the world and its problems have changed substantially since the end of the Cold War. In place of a confrontation between two over-weaponed giants, many problems of security, trade and the environment require multilateral rather than bilateral solutions. Examples of institutionalized summitry include the regular meetings of the European Council under a changing presidency, the Group of 8 leaders of the advanced industrial nations, the Organization of African Unity, and the Non-Aligned Movement. What has also changed is that the audience for this new kind of summitry extends far beyond the respective governments, as various police forces know to their cost.

And what about the Blair–Bush summits? They were seldom called that, of course, possibly because the term “summit” seemed too formal for a meeting between friends. According to one Cabinet minister, “supporting the Americans is part of Tony’s DNA”. For Reynolds, the Iraq conflict grew directly out of Blair’s misuse of summit diplomacy. He makes a particularly sharp comparison:

"A well-intentioned leader convinced of his rightness, whose confidence in his powers of persuasion bordered on hubris. Who squeezed out critical professional advice, controlling policy and information from an inner circle, and who played his best hands too early at the conference table. A leader whose rhetoric became increasingly extravagant and deceptive, yet whose apparent naivety may have been the outward face of a man who knew he had gone too far to turn back. Who does all this remind us of? For all their differences, Tony Blair’s approach to summitry had a good deal in common with that of Neville Chamberlain."

Reynolds has thoughtfully drawn up a list of dos and don’ts for participants. Is there scope for real negotiation? If not, don’t go. Know the concessions you cannot afford to make and the concessions which you must have from the other side, or the exercise is pointless. Is the overall strategy one of coordination – common ground which requires only minor adjustments – or conversion? If it is necessary to bring the other side round to your way of thinking, to what extent should you use threats or rewards? Surprise can be a useful weapon. Personality matters, but there is a fine line between being too nice and gaining nothing, and too nasty and damaging future relations. Summitry is exhausting, and tiredness can result in mistakes which cannot be rectified. This leads to a final difficulty: can the agreement be implemented? Agreements need domestic support and political backing, and leaders go to great lengths to gain these, not always successfully. The final test is implementation, which can expose the cracks papered over when the primary goal was agreement and leaders ignored their bottom lines: too much was at stake for them personally to allow it to fail. Succeed now, fail later.

Neville Chamberlain is revealed as matching Henry Kissinger in vanity, while Ronald Reagan emerges as something of a statesman. Reynolds reveals how governments as foreign policy machines actually worked. These summits seldom followed strict patterns, and David Reynolds himself admits defeat when he tries to draw up rules for political leaders. Knowledge tempered by realism is always impressive. Summits is an important book, which should change the way we think about the international history of the twentieth century.

David Reynolds
SUMMITS
Six meetings that shaped the twentieth century
497pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 0 7139 9917 4

Kathleen Burk is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London. Her latest book, Old World, New World: The story of Britain and America, 2007, is soon to be published in the US.

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