A SECOND YALTA CONFERENCE
Hence the excitement in Russia’s state-controlled media over the possibility that Shenzhen could serve as a second Yalta conference.
At the first, in 1945, Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin not only created a framework for the United Nations but also agreed to enable the self-determination – via free democratic elections – of the countries they occupied. Stalin, of course, reneged, continuing the de-facto Soviet occupation of what later would become the Warsaw Pact.
To his credit, Trump seems to be pushing discussion of the potential China summit’s agenda toward nuclear arms control, not Ukraine or spheres of influence. This is an important area for diplomacy. It’s also one in which US and Russian interests coincide against China’s.
Xi is building his country’s nuclear arsenal quickly, but it remains far from parity, which would likely make any arms-control deal that would suit Moscow and Washington unattractive to Beijing. How would it then catch up?
That’s one reason the meeting might not happen, which might be for the best given the checkered record that great-power summits enjoy. They tend to depend heavily on both the balance of power on the day and the relative personal strengths and weaknesses of the leaders involved.
Munich, in 1938, needs no further comment. Yalta was shaped by the fact that three wartime allies at the table still had millions of troops on the ground, while Roosevelt was sick with heart disease and a brain tumour (he died soon afterward) and together with Churchill overly trusting of Stalin, who played them. A divided Europe and the Cold War followed.
John F Kennedy’s 1961 summit with Nikita Khrushchev was a diplomatic car crash that would have been better skipped. Khrushchev came away thinking Kennedy weak, unprepared and undisciplined. The Berlin airlift and Cuban missile crisis followed, as the Soviet leader tried to press an advantage he thought he had.
