Peter Caddick-Adams
Beyond the bluster of his meeting with President Trump, Vladimir Putin is in trouble. Isolated, outmanoeuvred, and stalled on the battlefield, Russia is tottering financially and militarily, while Zelensky's Ukraine continues to hold the upper hand.
Summits have become the common currency of international diplomacy. Think of Kennedy and Khrushchev at Vienna in 1961; Nixon and Mao Zedong in China, 1972; Reagan and Gorbachev in Reykjavik, 1986; or Trump and Kim Jong-Un at Singapore in 2018. In between, key meetings of NATO, the G7, EU, WEF, OPEC, the Commonwealth, or of BRICS Western-sceptic nations have also rejoiced under the moniker of summits.
The ease of long-haul air travel means there are many more gatherings of these alphabet soups than there used to be, but Winston Churchill, with his sense of history, was aware they were nothing new. He wrote about the Congress of Vienna, that ran from September 1814 to June 1815, attended in person the January to June 1919 peace negotiations at Versailles, and organised key encounters with Roosevelt and Stalin between 1941 and 1945.
The more significant they are to the world, the more summits require huge stage-management, massive preparation, and exhaustive face-time, still making them relatively rare beasts. Like London buses, none are witnessed for ages, then suddenly three appear. Recently, the world was treated to a Trump-Putin encounter to ‘solve the Ukraine question’ at the Elmendorf-Richardson US military base in Anchorage, Alaska, on 15 August. This was followed rapidly by a gathering of six NATO, EU and European leaders, plus Prime Minister Starmer and President Zelensky at the White House on 18 August to ‘correct Trump’s perceived pro-Moscow tilt’.
To thrash out the desires of their political masters, on 20 August, Italian Admiral Cavo Dragone, chair of NATO’s Military Committee, summoned the alliance’s 32 defence chiefs to a digital summit to consider America’s initiatives to end the Moscow-Kyiv antagonism and possibly put boots on the ground in Ukraine. The jury is out on the wisdom of a peacekeeping force. Back in the 1990s, NATO’s Bosnian commitment, with which I served, required at its height more than 60,000 personnel from 32 nations. Generals reckon that Ukraine, a much larger entity, could absorb 500,000, and with risks of an armed showdown with Russia, it would be a mission too far.
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