Commentary
The G7 meeting next week in Kananaskis, Alberta, could be an unusually interesting discussion by the standards of that group.
The first modern leaders’ summit was the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 (Metternich, Talleyrand, Castlereagh/Wellington, Nesselrode, etc.), which was reasonably successful. Berlin 63 years later (Bismarck, Disraeli, Andrassy, etc.) was a qualified success. Forty years later in 1919 came Paris and Versailles (Clemenceau, Wilson, Lloyd George, Orlando), not a success, and 19 years later, Munich (Hitler, Chamberlain, Daladier, Mussolini), was a disaster.
There were only three meetings of the American, Soviet, and British leaders in World War II, at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, and they were increasingly unsuccessful as Stalin reneged on all his commitments to liberate Europe. The next such meeting, also including the French leader Edgar Faure, was at Geneva in 1955. President Eisenhower opened the session with a demand that the USSR honour its Yalta commitments, and with a proposal for reciprocal toleration of aerial reconnaissance known as the “open skies” program. The Russian delegation was composed of the three factions contending for the succession to Stalin, but two of the faction heads, Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin, indignantly rejected the proposal. (It was finally accepted 17 years later. )…