Summit Conferences, U.S. and Russian

SUMMIT CONFERENCES, U.S. AND RUSSIAN

SUMMIT CONFERENCES, U.S. AND RUSSIAN, the occasions for heads of state or government to meet directly in what is often termed "personal diplomacy." While summits are often depicted as the opportunity for top leaders to reach breakthroughs on difficult issues their subordinates have been unable to resolve through negotiation, more often agreements signed at summit meetings are the culmination of traditional diplomatic work. Summits offer participants a chance to evaluate their counterparts in person, and allow leaders to impress domestic and international audiences with their peacemaking ability or diplomatic prowess, although the expectations they raise for dramatic progress can easily be disappointed.

Every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt has met with the Soviet or Russian leadership. Although each summit meeting was marked by circumstances specific to the historical moment, one can speak roughly of four phases: wartime meetings of the Allied leaders to plan strategy during World War II; a continued multilateral approach to dealing with crucial international issues in the Dwight D. Eisenhower years; a shift to bilateral discussions of nuclear arms limitation in the 1960s through the 1980s; and the attempt to forge a new relationship in the post–Cold War era.

Allied Conferences in World War II

The first wartime summit took place from 28 November to 1 December 1943, when President Roosevelt met with Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Tehran. Stalin pressed the Anglo-Americans to begin the promised cross-channel attack on German-held Europe, and promised to enter the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. Roosevelt proposed the creation of a postwar international organization to keep the peace, dominated by the "Four Policemen" (including China).

From 4 to 11 February 1945, the three met again at the Russian Black Sea resort of Yalta. Stalin consented to a four-power occupation of Germany (including a French force) and reaffirmed his promise to enter the war against Japan. But the central issue was the postwar fate of Eastern Europe, especially Poland. Stalin soon violated the Yalta agreement to assure representative government in Poland, made without provision for enforcement. This led Roosevelt's detractors to charge him with "betrayal" and to link the name of Yalta, like that of Munich, to appeasement, although the Yalta accords reflected the reality of the positions Allied armies had reached on the ground.

After Roosevelt's death and Germany's surrender, President Harry S. Truman traveled to Potsdam to meet Stalin and Churchill (replaced during the conference by Clement Attlee after his victory in British elections) from 17 July to 2 August 1945. They carved Germany into four occupation zones and settled on a policy of modest reparations and the rebuilding of Germany's basic infrastructure, rather than seeking the country's deindustrialization or dismemberment.

The sharpening of the Cold War after World War II brought a ten-year halt to U.S.-Soviet summit meetings. Summits were discredited in the minds of critics who believed that an ailing Roosevelt had been manipulated by a crafty Stalin at Yalta, and that there was nothing to be gained by personal diplomacy with untrustworthy rivals.

Summits on International Issues

The freeze began to thaw from 18 to 23 July 1955, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower met Premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party chief Nikita Khrushchev, along with Prime Minister Anthony Eden of Britain and French Prime Minister Edgar Faure at Geneva in the first East-West summit of the Cold War. Neither Eisenhower's proposal for an "open skies" inspection plan permitting Americans and Soviets to conduct aerial reconnaissance over one another's territory, nor the Soviet proposal for mutual withdrawal of forces from Europe, made any headway. However, after a decade of no meetings, many welcomed the lessening of international tension associated with the "spirit of Geneva." This was followed by the "spirit of Camp David," when Khrushchev visited Eisenhower at the presidential retreat in Maryland from 25 to 27 September 1959 and retracted his ultimatum demanding a final settlement of the status of Berlin.

The thaw proved short-lived. Two weeks before a planned summit in Paris on 16 to 17 May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down deep inside Soviet airspace. Khrushchev used the opening of the summit to denounce American aggression and then walked out. When Khrushchev met the new President John F. Kennedy in Vienna on 3 and 4 June 1961, the two leaders eyed each other grimly. They agreed to avoid superpower confrontation over the civil war in Laos, but made no progress toward a proposed ban on nuclear weapons testing, and clashed over the fate of Berlin.

The outbreak of the Six-Day War in the Middle East prompted an emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, which Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin planned to attend. Kosygin and President Lyndon B. Johnson met halfway between New York and Washington at Glassboro, New Jersey, from 23 to 25 June 1967. The Soviet premier called for American withdrawal from Vietnam and Israeli withdrawal from Egypt, and Johnson focused on nuclear issues. However, Kosygin had been given little power to negotiate by the Politburo, and no agreements were signed.

Détente and Nuclear Arms Talks

President Richard M. Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger sought to use negotiations with the Soviet Union to arrange an acceptable exit from the Vietnam War in exchange for improved relations. After Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972, Soviet leaders invited him to Moscow, where talks held from 22 to 30 May 1972, resulted in the signing of two agreements marking the beginning of "détente": a treaty limiting each country to the construction of two Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) systems, and an agreement limiting long-range land-based and submarine-based ballistic missiles, later known as the SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) treaty.

Communist Party Secretary Leonid Brezhnev visited the U.S. from 18 to 25 June 1973, where he and Nixon signed a number of minor agreements regarding agriculture, transportation, and trade. A meeting in Moscow from 27 June to 3 July 1974, held in the shadow of the Watergate scandal and under pressure from conservative opponents of arms control, brought no further progress on strategic arms limitations, although the ABM treaty was amended to reduce the number of ABM systems permitted from two to one.

After Nixon's resignation, President Gerald R. Ford met Brezhnev at Vladivostok on 23 and 24 November 1974, where they agreed on the outlines for a SALT II agreement. From 30 July to 2 August 1975, the two leaders met again in Helsinki during a signing ceremony of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Cooling relations brought about by the collapse of Saigon, superpower rivalry in Angola, and trade disputes lessened the possibility of progress toward a second SALT agreement, as did the upcoming American elections, in which Ford avoided all references to "détente" to resist challenges from the right.

The unpopularity of détente continued to grow during President Jimmy Carter's term. By the time he met Brezhnev in Vienna from 15 to 18 June 1979, relations with the Soviet Union had deteriorated over trade restrictions, Third World conflicts, U.S. rapprochement with China, and human rights. The two leaders were able to sign a SALT II agreement but Senate conservatives opposed the treaty and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December ended any hope of ratification.

President Ronald Reagan's first term was marked by remilitarization and a heightening of Cold War tensions that sowed fears that the superpowers might be sliding toward nuclear war, creating a mass antiwar movement in the United States and Europe. In response, Reagan met the new, reformist Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, at a "getacquainted summit" at Geneva from 19 to 21 November 1985, where despite a lack of agreement on nuclear arms reductions, the two leaders established warm personal relations. They met again in Reykjavik, Iceland, on 11 and 12 October 1986, and agreed to reduce intermediate-range nuclear missiles, but deadlocked over Reagan's devotion to space-based missile defense. At a third meeting in Washington from 7 to 10 December 1987, the two leaders signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, requiring the elimination of all U.S. and Soviet INF missiles. A fourth meeting in Moscow from 20 May to 2 June 1988, was more notable for the media images of Reagan strolling through the heart of what he had formerly called "the Evil Empire" than for the minor arms control agreements signed, and a final meeting in New York on 7 December was largely ceremonial.

End of the Cold War

The rapid pace of political change in Eastern Europe in 1989 led President George H. W. Bush to hold a shipboard meeting with Gorbachev off Malta on 2 and 3 December 1989. Although no agreements were signed, statements of goodwill indicated, as Gorbachev put it, that the era of the Cold War was ending. This was reinforced at a Washington summit from 31 May to 3 June 1990, when agreements on a range of issues including trade and chemical weapons were signed in an atmosphere of cooperation not seen since the height of détente. Gorbachev was invited to a Group of Seven meeting in London on 17 and 18 July 1991, where he and Bush agreed to sign a START (Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) treaty at a full summit in Moscow on 30 and 31 July. The Moscow meeting proved to be the last superpower summit, as the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the year.

Summits after the Cold War

Between 1992 and 2000, Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton met more than twenty times with Russian Presidents Boris Yeltsin or Vladimir Putin at bilateral summits or individually at multilateral venues. Talks on further nuclear arms reductions and securing the former Soviet arsenal and nuclear materials were a feature of many of the summits. At a Moscow meeting on 2 and 3 January 1993, Bush and Yeltsin signed the START II Treaty, promising to reduce each country's nuclear arsenal to between 3,000–3,500 warheads within ten years. Yeltsin used various summit meetings to argue unsuccessfully against the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and Clinton often pressed Yeltsin and Putin to seek a peaceful resolution to Russia's conflict with its secessionist province of Chechnya. Another regular feature of the discussions was the attempt by the Russian leaders to obtain better trade relations and economic aid from Western countries and institutions, and American pressure to link such concessions to structural reform of Russia's economy. The diminished drama and increased frequency of the meetings compared with the Cold War years confirmed the extent to which relations between the two countries had normalized by the end of the twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyle, Peter G. American-Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Garthoff, Raymond L. The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994.

LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–1996. 8th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997.

Paterson, Thomas G. American Foreign Relations. 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Weihmiller, Gordon R. U.S.-Soviet Summits: An Account of East-West Diplomacy at the Top, 1955–1985. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986.

Max Paul Friedman

See also Arms Race and Disarmament ; Cold War .