Leaders found out summits can be tricky
Kennedy, Nixon and Reagan each learned hard way
WASHINGTON — In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy spoke about the possibility of daring diplomacy to thaw even the coldest of relationships: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.”
Those words, often cited by President Barack Obama, could also be repurposed by President Donald Trump as he embarks on the most high-stakes U.S. summit in a generation, sitting down Tuesday in Singapore with North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un.
But Kennedy’s most consequential summit, which came just months into his presidency, was a disaster, according to historians.
Despite preparation, Kennedy did not heed the warnings of advisers familiar with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, whom he met in Vienna in June 1961. Kennedy’s attempts to establish a friendly rapport, which experts had cautioned him against, came across as weakness.
After the summit, he knew he had blown it, as did William Lloyd Stearman, a national security aide who traveled with Kennedy to Vienna.
“It was Al Capone meets Little Boy Blue,” Stearman recalled last week. “Kennedy was not used to dealing with a thug like Khrushchev. And the Cuban missile crisis can be traced back to Khrushchev's feeling that Kennedy was weak.”
Historians generally share that conclusion; and their understanding of that and other consequential summits, from Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China to the Reagan-Gorbachev summit of 1986, leaves them especially worried about grave risks of Trump’s brash, media-centric diplomacy as he faces with Kim.
Although he often criticizes his predecessors for failing to resolve the nuclear stalemate on the Korean Peninsula, Trump seems largely indifferent to history and its lessons.
He is heading into the Singapore summit, an effort to stave off a nuclear North Korea, with his characteristic nonchalance, telling reporters that his lack of preparation — National Security Council meetings, of which there have been none, briefing books and hours of Situation Room strategizing — will be more than offset by his instincts and “attitude.”
“This is a neophyte who has given every indication that he does not like to do his homework, and the cost could end up being very great,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “We’ve never seen a president who wears as such a badge of honor that he won’t prepare. There’s no president in American history that has done that, and certainly not on a summit as important as this.”
“For Americans, the lives of their children are literally depending on what is said. He is the guardian of every American life — how seriously does he take that responsibility?”
It’s been less than a year since Trump threatened to “annihilate” Kim, whom he dubbed “Little Rocket Man.” He has since softened his words, but he believes his bellicose rhetoric played a significant role in getting North Korea to suggest faceto-face talks.
Those comments reminded some of the socalled madman theory that was later ascribed to Nixon and his envoys’ attempts in 1969 to convince the Russians that the U.S. president was unhinged and capable of doing anything to resolve the stalemate in Vietnam.
“Given his admiration for Nixon, Trump could be using it as a model,” said John Farrell, author of “Richard Nixon: A Life,” published last year.
But Nixon’s efforts to scare Russia did not bear fruit. What did work was his 1972 visit to China, which restored a diplomatic relationship between the two world powers.
That triumph only occurred after years of diplomatic spadework, including a secret visit by Henry Kissinger to China a year earlier.
Trump, who is relying primarily on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, agreed hastily to the sit-down with Kim in March almost as soon as South Korea informed him that the North Korean leader sought a meeting. In the three months since, Pompeo has twice met with Kim to discuss denuclearization, setting the table for the complex negotiations that will take place in Singapore.
Like Nixon, who went to China without knowing if Mao Zedong would greet him, Trump is accepting some political risk in meeting with Kim, who is unlikely to scrap the nuclear program that brought the U.S. to the negotiating table without securing major concessions — a much heavier lift than Nixon had in 1972.
“Nixon had no preconditions going in, and both countries came out of that summit with nothing other than the understanding that they needed to talk and coexist,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “The (1972) summit’s achievement is just in the fact that it happened.”
Trumphas only recently engaged in setting more modest expectations for the summit, saying that this meeting could be just the beginning of a continuing dialogue.
“I’m not sure if he’ll recognize that a good, constructive meeting can be a victory in itself,” Naftali said. “If he’s not careful, he could paint himself into a corner, seeking an achievement he can’t actually get. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev.”
Like the Singapore summit, President Ronald Reagan’s 1986 summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, was hastily arranged in response to Gorbachev’s sudden willingness to ban all ballistic missiles. Reagan engaged in remarkably freeform negotiations and nearly came to a far-reaching agreement. But the American president ultimately balked, unwilling to give up his “Star Wars” missile defense program.
What at the time appeared to be a diplomatic failure is now seen as a success, as the talks allowed both countries to realize their shared desire to avoid a war and better understand the concessions each was willing to make. The following year, the U.S. and Soviet Union agreed on an arms reduction treaty. Now, historians view the meeting in Reykjavik as the beginning of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union itself.
“Reagan’s command of detail was not great, but we know now that he had actually been studying these issues for decades,” Beschloss said. “He had a very specific idea of how the Cold War would end. This was not a neophyte stumbling into the room.”