'Parley at the summit:' How the Trump-Kim meeting owes a debt to Churchill

WASHINGTON — President Trump is attending his ninth international summit in Singapore this week — or maybe 10th or 12th, depending on how you count them.

In addition to formal, high-level meetings with Persian Gulf countries, North Atlantic allies, industrialized economies and Pacific Rim nations, Trump has also applied the label to periodic get-togethers with world leaders at his Palm Beach, Fla., resort.

Indeed, the word "summit" gets thrown around so often in diplomacy that the events often become a blur of confusing code words like G-7, G-20, APEC, GCC, OAS and NATO.

Still, even more than the United Nations, these formal and informal summits have become the building blocks of global governance. And they can be high-risk, high-stakes gambles, leading to major strategic breakthroughs — or breakdowns.

Because of that, modern summits are often carefully choreographed, planned years in advance, and filled with “family photos” and other moments designed more for their visual effect than substantive work.

But Trump’s summit with North Korea Kim Jong Un hearkens back to a bygone era of high-risk summits where the outcome is not preordained.

For Trump, a one-on-one summit — known as a bilateral in diplo-speak, suits his negotiating style: Size up your adversary, establish a rapport and make a deal.

"I don’t think I have to prepare very much. It's about attitude," he said last week. "It's about willingness to get things done."

'The Big Three'

It was the high-level meetings of allied powers in World War II that set the stage for summits that would define the world order in the 20th century.

Beginning with the Atlantic Conference in Newfoundland in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill — and later Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin — plotted strategy against Germany.

The "Big Three" met three times. At the last meeting, in Potsdam, Germany, President Harry Truman and his British and Soviet counterparts began the process of administering the a post-war peace. The decisions they made there — dividing Germany and its capital of Berlin into four zones of occupation by American, French, British and Soviet troops — would redraw the map of Europe for the rest of the century.

At Potsdam, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill attended alongside his successor, Clement Attlee, while the two party leaders awaited the results of parliamentary elections that Attlee's Labour party eventually won.

It was when Churchill was out of office in 1950 that he coined the idea of a "summit," which capitalized on a public fascination with Mount Everest expeditions. Remembering the war conferences, he said a face-to-face meeting with the Soviet leaders could dispel misunderstandings that could lead to nuclear catastrophe.

"The idea appeals to me of a supreme effort to bridge the gulf between the two worlds, so that each can live their life if not in friendship, at least without the hatreds and maneuvers of the Cold War," he said. "It is not easy to see how things can be worsened by a parlay at the summit if such a thing were possible."

In his book Summits: Six Meetings That Shaped the Twentieth Century, historian David Reynolds noted that the word summit conjured up "a perilous encounter between two adversaries" that could also open up "spectacular new vistas."

"It is this epic quality that lures statesmen to the summit," he wrote.

Two other ingredients would combine to make summits the hallmark of 20th-century diplomacy: The availability of air travel, which allowed world leaders to speak face-to-face instead of through ambassadors, and weapons of mass destruction, which gave the talks new importance and urgency.

Cold war, hot summits

Churchill would be re-elected and retired as prime minister by the time President Dwight Eisenhower met with leaders of the U.K., France and the Soviet Union in Geneva in 1955.

Like Churchill, President John F. Kennedy had campaigned on a willingness to talk to the Soviets. "It is far better that we meet at the summit than at the brink," he said. After being elected in 1960, he and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exchanged back-channel messages until they agreed to meet in Vienna for what Kennedy called "an informal exchange of views."

Informal and heated, as it turned out.

Over two days in June 1961, Khrushchev berated Kennedy over Berlin and other issues, all but threatening nuclear war. The summit was largely viewed as a failure, leading to the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Richard Nixon resumed semi-regular Soviet summits, becoming the first president to visit Moscow in 1972. Those summits led to some moderately successful arms control agreements.

But it was President Ronald Reagan who would provide some of the most dramatic summits in the history of the Cold War, meeting with Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev five times in just more than three years.

They largely postured in Geneva in 1985, but in 1986 they came close to an agreement to ban all nuclear weapons, only to have the talks break down because Reagan would not agree to give up his space-based defense initiative derided by critics as "Star Wars."

But those talks led to later breakthroughs on nuclear, chemical and conventional weapons.

'Rise of the informals'

After the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended — or at least, took a respite — the most important global summits were no longer between nuclear powers, but economic powers. The Group of Seven (known for a time as the G-8 before Russia was expelled following its annexation of Crimea) began meeting in the 1970s, and the broader G-20 was created in 2008 to deal with the global financial crisis.

That marks a trend that Alan Alexandroff calls "the rise of the informals."

Alexandroff, director of the Global Summitry Project at the University of Toronto, said those meetings have evolved from meetings of finance ministers into heads of governments — who, in keeping with the summit metaphor, are led around by lower-level officials known as "sherpas."

"It's the iceberg theory of summits. Underneath the leaders getting together on an annual basis there's a lot of officialdom working to make it happen throughout the year," he said.

But all that preparation can dissolve in an instant. At the G-7 summit in Quebec last weekend, Trump pronounced the state of the economic alliance as being as strong as ever. "I would say that the level of relationship is a 10," he said.

After Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau threatened retaliatory tariffs against U.S.-made goods, Trump changed his tune hours later, calling Trudeau "very dishonest" and pulling out of the carefully crafted joint statement calling for "free, fair, and mutually beneficial trade and investment."

WPXI