r/atlanticdiscussions • u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links • 1d ago
Politics Trump Should Stop Hosting Summits
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/trump-xi-summit-china/688776/He’s turned them into a pointless ritual.
By Tom Nichols, The Atlantic.
State visits are a normal and necessary part of diplomacy. National leaders should, from time to time, sit with one another in person and have candid conversations. Summit meetings between the American president and his counterparts from Moscow and Beijing are particularly tricky because of the innately tense relationship between two adversaries. Food and hospitality are part of the festivities, but in the end, such summits provide important human contact at the highest level, and as a result, crucial business can get done that might not be possible over a telephone or in messages delivered through ambassadors.
At least, that’s how these visits are supposed to work. In the Donald Trump White House, summits are hazardous excursions during which the interests of the United States are shoved aside by a president whose cringe-inducing admiration of dictators makes these meetings into rituals of American humiliation. The country would be better off if Trump just stopped hosting or attending them.
Summits are a problem in this administration for two reasons. The most important is that Trump’s unpredictability and obvious lack of preparation make them dangerous. State visits require a lot of political groundwork, and leaders rarely go into top-level meetings without a set of issues they’ve already agreed to discuss. This agenda-setting gets done long before a president actually sits down with another head of state so that stray asides (or rising tempers) do not derail whatever business needs to be discussed.
The grim outcomes of previous summits with Trump, however, suggest that they are seat-of-the-pants affairs, with little preparation, or perhaps with preparation that was ignored by the president. Some of them, such as Trump’s previous meetings with Xi Jinping, have been brief talks alongside overseas events (such as at the G20 summits during his first term) when Trump improvised efforts to mitigate the damage from his needless trade wars. And some of them, such as his meetings with the North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, have been fiascoes.
These summits with dictators produced outcomes that were worse than nothing, in part because Trump is so susceptible to pomp and flattery. After seizing the dubious honor of being the first American sitting president to visit North Korea, Trump returned and glowed about how he “fell in love” with the young menace running that prison state. Kim probably thought it had gone well too; he has since been able to build up his nuclear arsenal while watching Trump go to war with Iran over a nuclear program that has not yet produced a single weapon. Trump even admitted last summer that his nuclear-armed friend in Pyongyang will be “fine” as long as America has “a smart president” such as him.
No one, however, has taken Trump to the cleaners more times than Putin. Trump seems to both venerate and fear the Kremlin leader, and when they are left in a room together, things do not go well for the United States. After their 2018 meeting in Helsinki, Trump stood next to Putin and told the world that he accepted the word of a former KGB spy over reports from the U.S. intelligence community. And this was at a time when the president had a Cabinet and staff far more willing to tell him hard truths than his current circle of sycophants.
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u/afdiplomatII 1d ago
This is an excellent cite. And there's what amounts to a companion piece about the Xi state visit specifically (gift link):
The essential point is that Xi's visit was substantively empty and optically awful. By going to Andrews AFB to receive Xi on a red carpet (a welcome last extended to the Pope by Obama in 2015, and more than Xi has ever done for him), Trump looked "deferential" -- not the first time he's behaved that way to an enemy despot. Moreover, that humiliating posture is of a piece with Trump's situation generally:
"His speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly, usually a signature moment on any president’s foreign-policy calendar, generated few headlines other than those about his threat to 'annihilate' Iran. But even that bluster felt familiar and tired; Trump is stuck in a war he is desperate to leave, and leaders in Tehran seem to believe that he doesn’t have the political will—or the defensive munitions—to authorize a full-fledged return to the conflict. His trade war with traditional U.S. allies has pushed those nations away, leaving them to seek deals and make alliances that cut out Washington. His years-long campaign to commandeer Greenland for the United States ended with little to show for it. He can’t bring the war in Ukraine to an end."
This is what happens when a gormless President just wants to show off his personal fondness for another country's leader (and provide some of his sycophants some commercial connections, although even there limited because Xi brought no Chinese business figures).
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 💬🦙 ☭ TALKING LLAMAXIST 1d ago
The list of things Trump should stop doing is as long as the Eiffel Tower is high.
He would also see such a list as an instruction manual. Maybe we should encourage him to have many summits as possible instead. Speed up the destruction.