When Substance Was King, and the Waltz the Photo-op

Jiang Zemin had a wonderful time on his U.S. vacation. He tasted barbecue, got a new hat and bought $3 billion in new Boeings. He saw the Liberty Bell and rang another one at the New York Stock Exchange. He enjoyed a cholesterol-loaded breakfast with George Bush at the Waldorf Astoria and fat-free cuisine with Bill Clinton at the White House.

But what about the diplomacy? This was supposed to be a summit of the world’s one superpower and the nation that looks likely to match that eminence by the time the president collects Social Security.

Instead, we had diplomacy of the photo-op, with the photo-op and by the photo-op. The one pale shadow of substance was yet another Chinese promise to limit technology exports to rogue states with nuclear ambitions, and that was all settled before Jiang left Beijing.

This was bizarre. Half the Pacific Rim was in financial meltdown as the two leaders met. And Asia is the world’s fattest military-exports market today.

There was, in short, lots to discuss. But that is no longer the point of modern summits. They have become so scripted in advance, so orchestrated for each last nuance of symbolism and protocol, that they resemble more the old dynastic visits among Europe’s royal heads than a working encounter between hands-on political leaders.

There is a fashionable theory to explain this. It starts from the end of the Cold War, which so turned down the diplomatic heat that it left leaders with less and less burning substance to discuss. Then the end of the Cold War brought America global dominance that left it without equals to bargain with.

“Diplomacy was traditionally about numbers of different European powers juggling with one another, looking for advantage or looking for balance,” says former Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, elaborating the theory. “We don’t have those concert-of-Europe circumstances in the same way, so the classical diplomacy of the past has changed.”

Certainly, the mood music of summitry was transformed by the end of the Cold War. Recall the Malta summit-at-sea in 1989. Bush held up the old traditions by staying aboard a U.S. warship. But Mikhail S. Gorbachev turned up in a Russian cruise liner, complete with bilingual signs promising cocktails and “Sun Deck This Way.”

If it all felt more like a setting for a dance than for a summit, that was Gorbachev’s contribution to bringing back the good old days of diplomacy, when a real summit would last for months and half the negotiations were done between the waltzes at the formal balls.

Perhaps the best example of this was the Congress of Vienna, which lasted for a year, thanks to a 100-day interruption when Napoleon escaped from his exile on the island of Elba, resumed control of France and it took the combined British and Prussian armies at the battle of Waterloo to stop him. Having dashed from the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels to start deploying his army, the Duke of Wellington then went back to the diplomatic dance in Vienna.

The 1815 Congress of Vienna settled the peace of Europe for the next generation, restoring the dynastic grandeur of a concert of Europe in which France and Britain, Austria and Prussia, Russia and the Ottoman empire managed to resolve the occasional flare-up without any lasting damage to anyone’s national interest.

The popular revolutions of 1848 overturned the Vienna system. But once the wars of national aspiration had ended, and there was a new king of Italy and a new kaiser of Germany, the diplomats soon had the reliable old system running again.

The Congress of Berlin in 1878 was another mammoth event. Called to resolve another conflict in the Balkans that had become a Russo-Turkish war, all the grand figures of the Victorian age assembled. Germany’s Prince Bismarck and Britain’s Benjamin Disraeli, among other things, created the new states of Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. Britain ended up with Cyprus, news of which came to London when the diplomatic correspondent of the Times, Count Henri de Blowitz, smuggled out a copy of the draft treaty inside his top hat. He had obtained it through a contact made at a ball.

Americans have seldom been comfortable with these concert-of-Europe affairs, possibly because the only one a U.S. president attended in a starring role ended in disaster. Woodrow Wilson was enthusiastically welcomed to Paris for the 1919 peace negotiations that ended WWI. The creation of the new states of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia from the ruins of the Hapsburg empire was the result of his insistence on the right of national self-determination, to prevent Europe’s tribal nationalisms from disrupting the peace of the world yet again.

Fat chance. The Treaty of Versailles left a disgruntled Germany that was back on the warpath within 20 years. Wilson’s dream of world peace being secured by his new League of Nations was sabotaged when his own Senate refused to ratify the treaty.

What went wrong with America’s glittering entry into world diplomacy in the hall of mirrors at Versailles? It was not, as Wilson suspected, the bad old European habit of secret diplomacy. Nor was it his other bugbear, the wicked arms manufacturers. It was, quite simply, a different sense of time.

For Wilson, it had been “the war to end wars.” The treaty ending it should establish permanent institutions to ensure a permanent peace. For the world-weary European diplomats, Wilson’s idealism missed the point, which was to keep the show on the road for another generation, have a splendid social time and ensure their fellow ambassadors and plenipotentiaries that there was nothing personal in the great game.

Classical diplomacy depended on the European social system. The ruling dynasties and aristocracies required an essential stability in international as well as domestic affairs. The arrival of the revolutionary ideologies of communism and fascism, and the spasmodic interventions by Americans who did not understand the game, meant the diplomatic system now included players who had no interest in maintaining it.

A tame echo of the old days can still be found in the summits of the European Union. But on a global scale, the only modern equivalent is the annual G-7 summit of the leading industrial nations, now joined by Russia to make a G-8. It works because all members are broadly comfortable with the international system of global trade and economics, all guaranteed by the United States as the solitary superpower.

The G-7 has little to discuss, at least until the question of China’s entry crops up. So they argue about protocol and diplomatic good manners instead. Germany’s Helmut Kohl and France’s Jacques Chirac departed last summer’s G-7 session in Colorado complaining of the “triumphalism” with which Clinton touted America’s economic performance.

But Clinton was playing to the only audience that matters in diplomacy these days, the TV cameras carrying his message to his domestic audience. So, in their way, were Kohl and Chirac, reflecting Europe’s grumpiness at U.S. dominance and their own secondary roles in a diplomatic event that no longer counts for much. The heirs of Bismarck and Metternich, of Talleyrand and Disraeli, have become so many walk-on players in Bill’s made-for-TV summit drama.

Their only compensation is that Clinton, in turn, became the exotic backdrop to Jiang’s home movie for the biggest TV audience of all: How I taught the foreign barbarians to respect China. And never quite had to say “sorry” for the Tiananmen Square massacre.

That would have taken diplomacy too far.*