By David Reynolds

The chilly struggle ruled international heritage for almost part a century, locking superpowers in an international contention that in basic terms ended with the Soviet cave in. the main decisive moments of twentieth-century international relations happened while international leaders met face to face—from the mishandled summit in Munich, 1938, which triggered the second one global battle, to Ronald Reagan's notable chemistry with Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva in 1985. In Summits, eminent diplomatic historian David Reynolds takes us along the statesmen who stood, if basically in short, on most sensible of the realm, supplying worthy classes as we discover ourselves confronting once more a conflict with out end.

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In retrospect it is easy to criticize Wilson’s approach to the negotiations. Although he had established a think tank of academics and journalists known as “The Inquiry” back in September 1917, which drew up a multitude of useful background papers, he made much less use of his technical advisors than did the British. 47 On the latter, he was therefore obliged to work with a largely British draft. ”48 As such he was not particularly adept at the cut and thrust of parliamentary-style debate when the conference settled down to hard bargaining within the Council of Four (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando, the Italian leader).

After the introduction of the electric telegraph in the 1870s, ciphered telegrams replaced written dispatches for urgent business. Now that messages could be sent and answered within hours, the embassies in far-flung capitals could be subject to daily supervision. 21 The communications revolution was profoundly important for summitry. Not only did it emasculate the role of ambassadors, it also allowed heads of government to take center stage once more. The Congress of Berlin in 1878 is in many ways a precursor of modern summits.

S. State Department. Cartoonists portrayed world leaders eyeing a peak or perched uncomfortably on its top (figure I-1). 2 Yet familiarity breeds insensitivity. ” The archaic “parley,” much used by Shakespeare, evokes a hazardous encounter between enemies to broker terms. In Titus Andronicus, for instance, the scheming Empress Tamora tells the Roman noble, Aemilius: Go thou before, be our ambassador: Say that the emperor requests a parley Of warlike Lucius3 And “summit” conjures up the heritage of European Romanticism—the mountain peak as both perilous and sublime—celebrated, for example, by the poet William Wordsworth, the novelist Thomas Mann or the painter Caspar David Friedrich.

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