Reynolds is perhaps also a touch naive when, in a discursive attack on the Bush–Blair summits before the Iraq war, he claims that it was within US power to end the Israeli–Palestinian ‘impasse’, if only the president had wanted to. As the crisis had been going strong for years since the outbreak of the second intifida, and for several decades in the longer run, this criticism is unfair. Similarly, Reynolds’s accusation that Blair ‘resorted to deception in an effort to make domestic realities conform to what had been agreed at the summit’ was comprehensively disproved by both the Hutton and Butler inquiries. Nor is it true that Blair was Bush’s ‘sole significant ally’ in Europe in 2003, when both José Maria Aznar and Silvio Berlusconi were in power. Equally, I wonder whether George W. Bush really did tell senior US senators in 2003: ‘F*** Saddam, we’re taking him out,’ and readers would expect from a distinguished historian like Reynolds something weightier than a reference to a Time magazine article to substantiate it.
Yet if Reynolds’s analysis seems a touch weak for 21st-century issues, it is spot-on in the 20th, when mapping what he calls ‘the contours of the century of hate’. Munich cheated Hitler of the war he lusted after and could have won, Reynolds believes, while the Yalta summit was a success in almost every area outside Poland, which was doomed by virtue of its geographical position in any case. It was not Yalta that condemned Eastern Europe to Soviet tyranny for 44 years anyhow, he contends, but the Allied grand strategy that delayed D-Day until June 1944. Reynolds ingeniously argues that Yalta was not another Munich, but then the Munich wasn’t what is generally thought of as Munich either.
It is amazing that no historian has really analysed the concept of summitry before; a real lacuna in our historiography has been closed. By making distinctions between the talents required for preparation, negotiation and implementation, and by splitting summit types into the ‘personal’, ‘plenary’ and ‘progressive’, Reynolds has imposed a structure on all future study of the subject.
More work will be needed, as summitry continues to increase exponentially; at the 1994 Naples summit there were so many computers, photocopiers, media lights and other equipment that the city’s electrical grid collapsed, and the British delegation was restricted to one lightbulb per room. Yet still summits grow in number, size and length. Reynolds’s well-researched, well-written and generally sage book is an excellent ground-breaker for what promises to be a new historical genre.
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