80 years of summits in seven charts

By THE DATA TEAM

THE leaders of North Korea and the United States have never met since Korea was divided in 1953. That drought is set to end on June 12th, when Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un will hold a joint summit in Singapore. The historical record of such groundbreaking get-togethers is mixed. Some led to diplomatic breakthroughs; others failed to forestall war. And in many cases, historians’ eventual verdict was utterly different from that of observers at the time.

To measure this gap, we chose seven high-stakes summits from the past 80 years. As a proxy for their importance, we list the participants’ economic and military strength. We also dug up The Economist’s coverage of the summits as they occurred, and ran each sentence through Google Cloud’s sentiment-analysis tool. The average score should provide a rough measure of whether the information available at the time offered more cause for hope or for despair.

In 1938 Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, flew to Munich in a last-ditch attempt to avert a war with Germany. Adolf Hitler, the German Führer, had already dissolved the country’s democracy, built up its army and started to persecute its Jews. Chamberlain returned home believing that he had cast-iron assurances from Hitler not to invade Czechoslovakia, famously waving the letter Hitler had signed as he disembarked in Britain. Writing in 1938, The Economist was far more cautious. “There is nothing optimistic,” we wrote “in a forecast that sees only a breathing space before the return of crisis, whether that breathing space be six months or two years. For in either case we are dependent on the whim of the dictators, and there is neither optimism nor security” in that. The second world war began the following year.

As the second world war drew to a close, the three remaining Great Powers gathered together in Yalta, Crimea. Franklin Roosevelt, the American president; Winston Churchill, the British prime minister; and Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union, met to draw up the outlines of the post-war world order. The Economist was somewhat optimistic after the conference: we wrote that “there will be no room for aggression if the Great Powers can remain united in friendship nor will the the smaller nations resent this hegemony, if it is the servant and not the master, of international life.” During the subsequent decades, however, the billions of people still living under colonial rule or as Soviet vassals wound up resenting their hegemony quite a bit.

Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor, had run the Soviet Union for eight years when he met John F. Kennedy, America’s fresh-faced president, in Vienna. They had much to discuss: America had just launched a failed invasion of Cuba, a Soviet ally, and the two countries were embroiled in a proxy war in Laos. The Economist thought the meeting brought a welcome reduction in tensions: "So long as this delicate balance of trust continues,” we said, “neither side is likely to take actions that stretch the other’s patience to the snapping point.” That “delicate balance” barely lasted a year: in 1962 Khrushchev set off the Cuban missile crisis by deploying nuclear weapons on America’s doorstep.

In 1949, at the close of the Chinese Civil War, it was American warships that helped the Nationalists protect their final stronghold in Taiwan from Communist forces. The United States and China were estranged for the following two decades. But Richard Nixon, the Republican president whose foreign policy was driven by realpolitik, sought to capitalise on a diplomatic split that had divided China and the Soviet Union, its former Communist ally. In 1972 he visited China in person, setting the stage for American recognition of the government in Beijing seven years later. The Economist rated the visit a mixed bag. “The President gave away rather more than he got,” we said, but nonetheless “the result cannot be ruled a defeat or a victory for either side.”

Ronald Reagan took a strong line against the Soviet Union early in his presidency: in 1983 he dubbed America’s Cold War adversary an “evil empire”. Two years later, however, he met his new Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, for the first time, and in 1986 they met in Reykjavik to discuss arms control. The talks were far-ranging and ambitious. Reagan pressed Mr Gorbachev on human rights, while Mr Gorbachev insisted on limits to America’s missile-defence programme. The two leaders nearly agreed to complete nuclear disarmament, but the talks ultimately failed. Although The Economist thought it probably “a mere stumble on the road”, we feared that the failure might have been part of an effort by Mr Gorbachev “to break Western Europe away from America”. The former prediction proved correct: the next year, the two countries signed a new arms agreement that, for the first time, saw each country’s nuclear arsenals shrink.

The first meeting between the heads of state of divided Korea took place in June 2000. Kim Jong Il, the current supreme leader’s father, met the then-South Korean president, Kim Dae-jung, at the airport near Pyongyang. The three-day conference began with the pair holding hands for the 50-minute journey from the airport to the city, as some 600,000 North Koreans lining the route waved at them. Details of an agreement were fleshed out in a follow-up meeting months later. Although The Economist welcomed the rapprochement, we warned that the “summit may have shown people in the South how much more deeply Koreans are divided than the two Germanies were. Because of that, the cost of reconciliation, both financial and emotional, is bound to be far higher.” That analysis still holds true today.

Donald Trump has brought his own unorthodox style to his meeting with Kim Jong Un. Just ten months ago he was threatening North Korea with “fire and fury”. He now thinks that he can cut a deal with a dictator who has called him a “mentally deranged US dotard”. In a startling break from diplomacy-as-normal, no lower-level dialogue or groundwork has preceded the summit in Singapore. Instead, Mr Trump and Mr Kim will face off in a room with just a translator to separate them. Expect fireworks.

Update: June 12th

In Mr Trump's estimation his meeting with Mr Kim was successful. "We had a really fantastic meeting. A lot of progress", Mr Trump effusively reported to the hordes of press. Yet the document the two signed was long on symbolism and extremely short on detail. Mr Trump agreed to halt joint military exercises with South Korea for fear of provoking the North. Mr Kim, for his part, has been rewarded with the propaganda victory of appearing as an equal to an American president. The Economist's take is that "the hard work of turning rhetoric into substance will be left to others” and that “whatever leverage Mr Trump had over Mr Kim a few weeks ago, he has less now.”