2 days ago
What can we learn from past summits before Trump-Putin meeting?
'Will he become my new best friend?' mused the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, after inviting
President Putin
to the beauty parade in Moscow in 2013. Alas, the Russian leader was too busy with affairs of state to attend. He can't have known that he was passing up a meeting with the future US president. Maybe he wouldn't have gone even if he had known. The former KGB agent knows that keeping people waiting and guessing is a superpower.
Fast forward 12 years: the
summit in Anchorage, Alaska
on Friday will be the sixth encounter between President Putin and
President Trump
. Best friends would be overdoing it, but both men will be trying to make the most of the understanding they have developed.
Putin will have read reams of intelligence on Trump – his prejudices, his predilections, his vulnerabilities. Trump, by contrast, eschews the offerings of the CIA, saying he knows within a couple of minutes after walking into a room whether there's going to be a deal.
'He is an instinctive operator,' says Professor David Reynolds, author of Summits: Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century.
'European leaders are afraid that Trump will be outwitted by Putin one-on-one in a room.'
That happened, famously, when the two men met in
Helsinki
in 2018. American security services had told Trump that the Russians had interfered in the 2016 election – to his advantage.
'I have great confidence in my intelligence people but I will tell you President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,' said Trump. He had bought the Kremlin's line. He trusted Putin, a trained KGB operator, who knows exactly how to manipulate a man like Trump who is susceptible to flattery and persuasion.
The most infamous example of a leader trusting another too much came in 1938 when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from a meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich brandishing a piece of paper that said the Führer had promised not to continue his blitzkrieg across Europe in exchange for Britain and France allowing Germany to keep part of Czechoslovakia. But 'peace in our time' ended up as 'appeasement'. Hitler had no intention of stopping, and Chamberlain's attempt at negotiation has gone down in infamy.
At the end of the Second World War, the Big Three – Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt – met at Yalta to carve up Europe. Winston Churchill, then British prime minister, far preferred the company of the Russian dictator, Josef Stalin, to that of US President Franklin D Roosevelt, who was in ill-health and somewhat subdued.
'Trump really admires strong men and Putin is one of those,' says Professor Reynolds.
'Similarly, Churchill, at the back of his mind, didn't forget that Stalin was a mass murderer, but actually he was interesting. He had a dry sense of humour and he had done some amazing things to turn his country around.'
Stalin did not keep the promises he made Churchill at Yalta, refusing to allow free and democratic elections in eastern Europe. The Cold War was born.
Forging a peace agreement on Ukraine will require a detailed understanding of Ukrainian geography and history – not to mention the participation of the Ukrainian government and people. Trump, however, cares nothing for such complexities, nor the democratic niceties of the Ukrainian constitution. He's more interested in striding the world stage in the company of his friend Vladimir.
World leaders often put great store by the chemistry between them, and their own ability to triumph in negotiation, but diplomats tend to be less convinced by the greatness of great men. 'They're terrified about having leaders in a room talking to each other,' says Reynolds. 'The diplomats are usually greatly contemptuous in private in their diaries about the leader's ignorance of everything and really do not want these men let loose on international problems.'
European diplomats are watching the summit in Anchorage with trepidation. They fear that, in his haste to get a deal, and with his admiration for Putin, Trump will sell Ukraine down the river. American diplomats, who will have to finesse any agreement in which the Russians get a clear advantage, are well aware of the dangers. They might read a poem that British officials circulated during the Second World War as Great Men talked war and peace.
'And so while the great ones depart to their dinner,
The secretary stays, getting thinner and thinner.
Racking his brains to record and report
What he thinks that they think that they ought to have thought.'
This article was originally posted on Substack, subscribe to Channel 4 News
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