Abstract
Aimed at providing ‘an introduction for researchers new to a topic … and essential reading in classrooms’ (p. viii) this book does just that, and does it well. It covers six summits (Potsdam, 1945; Bandung, 1955; Glassboro, 1967; Beijing, 1972; Vienna, 1979; Malta, 1990). For each one, it offers a good reconstruction based on material available from US, Soviet, Chinese, Indian, French and British archives, and of course memoirs, biographies etc. Each chapter opens up with exhaustive coverage of historical background and policy context. It then provides a detailed chronicle of the talks – with extensive quotations – and concludes with the author’s summary judgment on results and effectiveness. The book does not deal with the summits’ symbolism and mythology, the expectations they raised or their impact on public opinion. Nor does it pretend to contextualize them in the broader history of summit diplomacy, or in the late twentieth century multiplication of top level meetings like the G-7. Its exclusive focus is on Cold War top-level diplomacy. As such, this is indeed the book to begin with for researchers working on, say, Glassboro or Malta, and related issues.
Tudda’s starting point is a critique of the political science literature on Cold War summits as exclusively focused on Western actors and far too limited in the use of recent archival sources. This is a point most historians can agree with, and it explains some of the author’s choices, like the inclusion of Malta 1990. I am also fully convinced both by the inclusion of Potsdam and by the author’s conclusion that it was the last attempt at a negotiated peace agreement rather than the first Cold War summit. In the uneasy balance between cooperation and rivalry, the search for the former still prevailed, while Cold War antagonism would fully develop only later. The inclusion of the momentous meeting between Nixon and Mao in 1972 is also self-explanatory, particularly given Tudda’s stated aim of internationalizing Cold War history.
The other criteria that drove the selection of summits appear less clear to me. Why Glassboro but not Camp David 1959? Why Vienna 1979 rather the Moscow and Vladivostok summits that formalized détente? In the absence of an explanation, one can only surmise. It is true, as the author states, that Glassboro has been largely overlooked even though it marked an important step on the way to détente. The same cannot be said, though, of the difficult encounter between Carter and Brezhnev in Vienna (which Tudda sees as emblematic of détente’s failure, with an uncharacteristically unilateral attribution of responsibility to the Soviets). It was dealt with, extensively, for instance, in Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind (New York 2007), a book that is surprisingly omitted from the bibliography even though its close focus on top leaders’ confrontation and dialogue overlaps in many ways with Tudda’s own approach.
By the end of the book, I was wondering whether the selection was driven – perhaps inadvertently – by the key argument advanced in Tudda’s conclusion. With the realization that survival in the nuclear age was a far more compelling issue than ideological rivalry, he argues that direct leaders’ diplomacy became crucial in order to control antagonism and regulate the nuclear armaments’ competition. Thus, the increasing emphasis on ‘personal interaction between world leaders’ so as to ‘overcome mistrust and misunderstanding’ (p. 184). Tudda claims that summits by and large served these purposes, a point most clearly borne out by Glassboro, Beijing and Malta. But would his argument still stand so clear-cut if the failed Four Power Summit of 1960 in Paris or the tempestuous 1961 encounter between Kennedy and Khrushchev in Vienna had been included in the overall picture? Many summits did enhance mutual understanding, but surely there were others that produced the opposite effect. The latter’s inclusion would have prompted a more nuanced and mixed assessment of Cold War summit diplomacy, while Tudda is so convinced of its effectiveness as to venture into a bold overall conclusion that strikes me as not entirely wrong but surely overstated: ‘the Cold War ended without a nuclear war, to a large measure due to the summits convened by world leaders’ (p. 184).
Finally, introducing Bandung among the Cold War summits is a welcome, bold choice. It zooms in on the intersection between Cold War antagonism and the rise of the global South, and expands our gaze beyond the great powers. Yet, I remain a bit puzzled by Tudda’s reading of Bandung as ‘the developing world … becom[ing] an important player in the Cold War’ (p. 66). In a way that is obviously the case, and yet Bandung could perhaps more usefully be seen as an anti-Cold War summit, as the proposition of an alternative logic of international relations, above all as the construction of an anti-colonial and anti-racist agenda against those powers that were actually expanding, in the name of Cold War rationale, new forms of imperial control. A keener discussion of Bandung’s distinctiveness could perhaps draw a starker profile of Cold War summit diplomacy?