Summitry is pointless — Biden came over as secondhand car salesman

The first and last thing to say about summits like the one on Wednesday between President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is that they’re nonsense. They’ve always been and they will always be nonsense.

Significant changes in policy and practical politics among great powers haven’t taken place and will never take place as a result of personal encounters between leaders. We know this because we know how often such changes haven’t happened during summit meetings — most notably, the time when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to stymie Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative by cleverly proposing a ban on all nuclear weapons. Reagan refused, SDI continued, and the technological advantage of the United States as demonstrated by SDI played a key role in the collapse of the USSR five years later.