Summits
Six Meetings that Shaped the Twentieth Century
by David Reynolds
Basic Books, 576 pp., $35

Nixon and Mao
The Week that Changed the World
by Margaret Macmillan
Random House, 432 pp., $27.95

Question: "In 1982 [sic], Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel, a trip that resulted in a peace agreement that has lasted ever since. In the spirit of that type of bold leadership, would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"

Barack Obama: "I would."

With that off-the-cuff answer, given at a Democratic presidential debate last July, Barack Obama unwittingly launched a controversy that, almost a year later, shows no sign of dissipating. He might have responded differently--and spared himself a lot of agonized backtracking on the part of his aides and supporters--if he had been able to read beforehand David Reynolds's Summits.

Reynolds is a professor of international history at Cambridge whose previous book, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War, was a fascinating account of how Winston Churchill wrote his World War II memoirs. He is, to judge by Summits, a man of the moderate left, or so I gather from his use of stock phrases such as "rush to war" when discussing the diplomacy that led up to the invasion of Iraq. There is no reason to think that he intended this book to be an indictment of the Obama mindset. But that is how it reads.

To be sure, he presents the advantages of summits: "Face to face across the conference table, statesmen can sense each other's needs and objectives in a way that no amount of letters, phone calls, or emails can deliver. Summitry can also cut through bureaucratic obstacles that block progress lower down." But he also warns that "the potential dangers are immense." Those dangers loom especially large, at least to this reader, in his discussion of six major 20th-century summits, most of which did not have a very happy outcome.

In his introduction, Reynolds notes that the term "summit" was coined by Churchill in 1950 when he called for "another talk with the Soviet Union at the highest level"--or a "parley at the summit." The metaphor was inspired, Reynolds believes, by news accounts of the British expeditions to scale Mount Everest. While the term is of recent vintage, the practice of leaders meeting with one another is, of course, ancient. In centuries past, kings or emperors would meet, usually on the boundary of their domains, so as to avoid the submission implicit in one monarch visiting another's court. (A famous get-together of this sort occurred in 1807 between Napoleon and Czar Alexander I on a raft on the Niemen River. The result was the Treaty of Tilsit, which created a short-lived Franco-Russian alliance.)

Reynolds argues that a qualitative change in summitry occurred in the early years of the 20th century--"made possible by air travel, made necessary by weapons of mass destruction and made into household news by the mass media or newsreels and television." The first summit of this sort, he writes, was Munich--hardly a propitious beginning.