Stand by for hand-to-hand combat as macho leaders meet

The most important handshake of the decade will happen on Friday in the German city of Hamburg. US President Donald Trump will meet his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for the mother of all handshakes, their first. Both will undoubtedly have been rehearsing.

Putin is a notoriously macho man who likes to be photographed riding horses bareback and bare-chested, wrestling bears and the like. And since Trump has contrived to turn the humble handshake into a battle of wills, the press corps will be waiting with bated breath for what used to be a diplomatic formality to turn into a bare-knuckle fistfight.

The handshake between men is believed to have originated as a gesture to prove that both participants were unarmed. These days, of course, these two men could launch an intercontinental missile with their spare pinkies while looking their adversary in the eye and shaking hands with the utmost apparent sincerity.

As the UK’s Guardian newspaper opined, for Trump the handshake is less a gesture of peace than a declaration of superiority. Note the grip he gave his supreme court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, yanking the judge towards him as if he were a pet dog on a leash. Trump made a similar show of alpha male supremacy with Japanese leader Shinzo Abe, clasping and tugging at Abe’s hand for a full 18 seconds – prompting a memorable eye-roll from the Japanese leader.

Other national leaders have been swift to learn the new rules, though. Canada’s Justin Trudeau went for a pre-emptive grip of the Trump forearm, making any Gorsuch-style yank impossible, while French President Emmanuel Macron admitted that his white-knuckle clinch with Trump, in which the two men appeared to be engaged in a squeezing duel that saw the US president break off first, was “not innocent”. His thinking was plain to see — fight alpha male fire with fire.