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Summits between the Greats, the talks that changed history

2025-08-10 15:08:17Histori SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev

The historic summit between US President Nixon and Chinese leader Mao Zedong, held in Beijing in 1972, was turned into an opera in 1987 with music by John Adams, libretto by Alice Goodman, Mao as a tenor, Nixon and Zhou Enlai as baritones, and Kissinger as a bass. 

But the summit between Ronald Reagan and Soviet Communist Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986 that paved the way for the end of the Cold War inspired two dramatic works.

First, the 1988 drama “A Walk in the Woods” by Lee Blessing, based on the “walk in the woods” in Iceland between American diplomat Paul Nitze and his Russian counterpart Yuli Kvitsinsky, during which they were unaccompanied and reached an understanding so profound that both the White House and the Kremlin rejected it. And yet, that moment paid off with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The forgotten meeting of October 11-12, some 39 years ago between Reagan and Gorbachev, is brought back to life in a Hollywood film, "Reykjavik", directed by Michael Russell Gunn and starring Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris. A film not to be missed, as the handshake between the US and Russia today is never just about politics, diplomacy, defense and intelligence, but also about humanity, popular culture, lost illusions and impossible hopes realized, writes La Repubblica.

Will the mid-August summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin go down in history through music or stage? Will it be a historic agreement like the one between Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, the city chosen in 1945 because the dictator was afraid to fly? Or will it be a failure, like in Vienna in June 1961, when Stalingrad veteran Khrushchev humiliated former Pacific front soldier Kennedy?

After the failure in Vienna, Kennedy and Khrushchev faced off during the 13 hectic days of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Facing the brink of nuclear conflict led President Johnson to a 1967 meeting in Glassboro, New Jersey, with Soviet statesman Alexei Kosygin.

This prompted President Nixon to fly to Moscow in May 1972 to sign with Leonid Brezhnev the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, the SALT I strategic arms limitation agreement, and an agreement to avoid military incidents at sea that marked the first essential steps to averting the apocalypse.

None of the leaders at these grand ceremonies were saints or apostles of human rights. None except Kissinger, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 (a prize that was refused by his Vietnamese counterpart Le Duc Tho). Now Trump dreams of winning that prize by stopping Putin in Ukraine. But these democratically elected men or leaders of authoritarian regimes were negotiators without illusions, convinced that a step forward was better than the burning ruins in places like Gaza or Donbas.

The end of the Cold War was followed by a brief period of hope that Moscow could begin a transition to democracy. President George H.W. Bush met with Boris Yelts four times between 1992 and 1993, signing the START II agreement to further reduce nuclear missiles. New President Bill Clinton held 20 summits with Yelts from 1993 to 2000. That year saw the debut of Vladimir Putin, who met three times with George W. Bush, who, driven by his Methodist faith, declared in 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. He was honest and trustworthy, I could feel his soul.”

Obama, by contrast, had only a cold handshake with Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, before the latter called for the extermination of enemies, including Americans. Two summits between the former KGB colonel Putin and Trump, and one with Biden in 2021, yielded next to nothing. The Kremlin seeks the return of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, with Ukraine reduced to a vassal like Belarus where there is nothing to negotiate except total defeat.

Trump and Putin will speak in Alaska, a territory purchased by US Secretary of State Seward in 1867 from the then-bankrupt Tsar Alexander II for $7.2 million, and no one can predict what will happen, for war or peace.

In 1948, during a speech at Westminster Abbey in honor of the martyrs, Churchill said:

"The only guide for a man is conscience, the only shield for memory is the justice and truthfulness of his actions. It is immoral to walk through life without this shield because we often laugh at the failures of our hopes and the reversal of accounts, but with this shield, no matter how fate plays, we always march in the ranks of honor."

Solemn words, the bitter absence of which we deeply feel today.


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