What the president can learn from his predecessors after the failed Vietnam summit with North Korea
President Trump left his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, Vietnam on Thursday without any deal to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. « Sometimes you have to walk, » Mr. Trump said, explaining that the two leaders were unable to reach any agreement.
But Mr. Trump is far from the first U. S. president to leave a high-stakes international meeting empty handed. Here are three other major talks that ended in failure:
Just before President Dwight D. Eisenhower was set to meet with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in for a four-power Paris summit between the U. S., France, Britain and the Soviet Union, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down by the Soviets on May 1,1960. The Soviets were able to recover the plane and took the pilot prisoner in a major embarrassment for the U. S., which believed its Cold War rival didn’t possess missiles capable of taking down a U-2.
Khrushchev used the revelation that the U. S. had been spying in the region for some time to his advantage, forcing Eisenhower to say that he had approved the flights in the hopes to avoid « another Pearl Harbor. » The Soviets also imprisoned the American pilot, Francis Gary Powers, who admitted that he had been on a spy mission despite initial U. S. denials.
Khrushchev entered the talks still enraged by the controversy, and insisted Eisenhower apologize for initiating the U-2 flight program and punish those involved in any espionage. The summit came to an abrupt end on May 16,1960 when Eisenhower refused to apologize for the U-2 flights and Khrushchev refused to meet with the president.
Similar to Mr. Trump’s first summit with Kim, the first meeting in Geneva between Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev laid the groundwork for a future summit in Reykjavik, Iceland in October of 1986. The leaders had exchanged letters back and forth throughout the year prior, making it seem that efforts toward abolishing nuclear weapons were a real possibility.
« There were a number of things that thad been discussed and left open in Geneva, such as INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces), the ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty, space arms and nuclear testing. The U. S. side was especially interested in strategic arms proposals for the U. S. negotiators in Geneva. Both the U. S. and USSR would like to see a world without nuclear missiles. This was a very important issue, and the world was interested in the possibility of achieving this, » an official U. S. memorandum of conversation of the talks provided by the Atomic Heritage Foundation reads.
