The World's Most Dangerous Meeting Was Probably Very Well Catered: THE THIRD PEG THEORY™ Serious history. Slightly relaxed. No pretending.
The World's Most Dangerous Meeting Was Probably Very Well Catered
About diplomacy.
Wars are usually remembered for the people who fought them. Diplomacy is remembered for the people who sat down afterward and discovered that somebody had to decide what the fighting had actually achieved.
Some of history's most dangerous rooms therefore looked remarkably harmless. There were tables. Chairs. Flags. Maps. Men in excellent suits. Women in excellent dresses, when women were permitted anywhere near the negotiating table. There were translators, aides, photographers, handwritten notes and, very often, dinner.
The catering was probably excellent.
The consequences were not.
Civilization has always had a peculiar habit of making its most consequential arguments look respectable. The battlefield has smoke, noise and bodies. The diplomatic room has polished silverware and somebody asking whether you would prefer the fish.
And yet the room can sometimes matter more than the battlefield.
Consider the Congress of Vienna. Europe had spent years being rearranged by Napoleon, whose particular approach to continental management involved armies, occupations and a remarkable amount of marching. When the fighting finally subsided, Europe's great powers gathered in Vienna to decide what came next.
They negotiated borders, alliances and the political balance of Europe. They also attended dinners, receptions, balls and an extraordinary amount of social activity.
This was not a distraction from diplomacy.
It was diplomacy.
The men negotiating Europe's future needed to discover whether they could tolerate one another long enough to agree on it. Conversation over dinner could accomplish something a formal session could not. A diplomat could say something informally that would be too dangerous to put into a memorandum. A relationship could be tested without a treaty being drafted. A disagreement could be softened before it became a position.
The dining table was sometimes the unofficial extension of the negotiating table.
The genius of diplomacy is that it understands something armies occasionally forget: people are easier to move when they are not being ordered to move.
The nineteenth century understood this instinctively. Diplomats cultivated relationships, exchanged invitations, observed etiquette and paid attention to who sat beside whom. Protocol was not merely decorative. It was information.
Who was invited mattered. Who was excluded mattered. Who arrived first mattered. Who was seated next to whom mattered.
Even the menu could carry a message.
Civilization had discovered an extraordinarily complicated way of saying, We are still speaking to each other.
Then came Versailles.
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 was tasked with constructing the peace after the First World War. It dealt with treaties involving Germany and the other defeated powers and with questions that would reshape Europe and the wider international system. The Treaty of Versailles itself contained provisions on Germany's borders, political arrangements, reparations and the League of Nations.
The room looked civilized.
The peace was not particularly simple.
The victorious powers arrived with different memories of the war and different ideas about what peace should accomplish. Security, punishment, reconstruction, territory, national self-determination and political calculation all sat at the same table.
The defeated were not negotiating from an equal position. The German delegation was presented with the conditions of peace and sought changes; the final settlement was ultimately signed at Versailles on June 28, 1919.
This is where the dinner-table metaphor begins to lose its charm.
A diplomatic table can be civilized without being equal.
That distinction matters because diplomacy is often mistaken for politeness. It is not. Diplomacy is what happens when people with conflicting interests discover that continuing the conflict is either too expensive, too dangerous or simply less useful than finding an arrangement they can live with.
Sometimes that arrangement is generous. Sometimes it is coercive. Sometimes it is brilliant. Sometimes everyone leaves the room convinced they have won.
History then takes over and sends the bill.
By the time the leaders gathered at Yalta in February 1945, the dinner table had become considerably more dangerous. Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin met from February 4 to 11 while the Second World War was still being fought. Allied victory in Europe was becoming inevitable, but the shape of the postwar world was not. They discussed Germany, Eastern Europe, the United Nations and Soviet participation in the war against Japan, among other matters.
This is the strange thing about diplomatic meetings.
The people sitting around the table are often negotiating two wars at once.
The first is the war that is ending.
The second is the world that will exist after it.
At Yalta, the leaders were not simply discussing how to finish the existing conflict. They were discussing the political architecture that would follow it. Agreements concerned the future of Germany, Eastern Europe, Poland, the United Nations and Soviet involvement in the Pacific.
The photographs from such meetings can therefore be slightly misleading.
Three men sit together. They smile. They shake hands. They look tired.
History sees something else.
Maps.
Armies.
Borders.
Millions of people who have not been invited into the room.
Then came Potsdam that summer. Germany had surrendered in May, and Truman, Stalin and Churchill—later replaced at the conference by Clement Attlee—met from July 17 to August 2 to continue negotiating the postwar settlement. The common enemy in Europe was gone, and the disagreements that had been partially contained during the war were becoming harder to conceal.
This may be one of diplomacy's most uncomfortable moments.
Sometimes an alliance survives because everybody hates the same enemy.
Then the enemy disappears.
Suddenly everybody remembers that they disagree.
The table remains.
The smiles become harder.
The menus continue.
The future gets colder.
But diplomacy is not merely the art of preventing war. Sometimes it is the art of making peace possible between people who have very good reasons not to trust one another.
That is what makes Camp David so interesting.
In September 1978, Jimmy Carter brought Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin together at the presidential retreat in Maryland. The summit lasted from September 5 to 17, and the negotiations were difficult enough that Carter had to spend extraordinary amounts of personal time trying to keep the process alive. The resulting Camp David Accords created a framework that ultimately led to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty signed in March 1979.
There were no armies storming the building. No borders were being crossed by tanks.
But the stakes were enormous.
The negotiations involved territory, security, Palestinian questions, diplomatic recognition and the future of relations between two states that had fought wars against each other. At several points the negotiations appeared close to collapse. Carter's own records show how intensely personal the process became.
This is the other side of the diplomatic table.
Sometimes the most important thing a diplomat accomplishes is not getting the other side to agree.
It is getting them not to leave.
That may be diplomacy's least glamorous skill.
Keeping the conversation alive. Keeping the telephone working. Keeping the interpreter in the room. Keeping somebody from announcing that negotiations are over. Keeping two people who deeply distrust one another talking for another twenty minutes.
And then another twenty.
And sometimes another twenty.
Civilization has spent thousands of years discovering that conversation is cheaper than war but considerably harder to organise.
This is why diplomatic protocol can look so absurd from the outside. There are flags, seating plans, motorcades, gifts, handshakes, photograph positions, translators, official dinners, state banquets and carefully prepared statements.
It can all look like theatre.
It is theatre.
But theatre can carry information.
A handshake says something. So does the absence of one.
A photograph says something. So does who stands where in it.
A state dinner says something. So does who gets invited.
The diplomatic banquet is therefore not simply a meal with better silverware.
It is a room full of signals pretending to be dinner.
Food itself has always been useful because eating together is one of humanity's oldest forms of social negotiation. You do not have to trust someone completely to eat with them. But you have to trust them enough not to spend the evening wondering whether the soup is an assassination attempt.
Hospitality creates a temporary social contract.
For the duration of the meal, everyone behaves as though civilization is functioning.
That temporary agreement can be surprisingly powerful.
An enemy becomes a guest.
A rival becomes a dinner partner.
A negotiator becomes a human being who has to listen to another human being complain about the weather.
Sometimes that is precisely what diplomacy needs.
Because states do not have emotions.
People do.
States have interests.
People have memories.
States have positions.
People have pride.
And somewhere between the two sits the diplomat, trying to persuade human beings to behave as though national interests can be negotiated without national honour being left bleeding on the carpet.
That is why the most successful diplomatic rooms are rarely the ones where everybody agrees.
They are the ones where disagreement remains possible without becoming irreversible.
The purpose of the table is not to make everyone friends. It is to give enemies somewhere to sit.
That is a much more serious achievement.
And it explains why diplomacy survives even in an age of satellites, instant communication, artificial intelligence and leaders who can speak directly to millions of people through a telephone.
The technology has changed.
The table has not.
Today's summit may have digital briefing books instead of leather folders. Translators may have better equipment. Leaders may communicate through secure devices before breakfast. Intelligence arrives faster. Messages travel instantly.
Yet eventually somebody still has to sit across from somebody else and say: What do you want? What can you accept? What will you never accept? What happens if we fail?
And, occasionally:
Would you like some coffee?
The last question may sound ridiculous.
It isn't.
Diplomacy depends on ordinary rituals because extraordinary disagreements are easier to manage when human beings are allowed to remain human.
A cup of coffee cannot settle a territorial dispute. A dinner cannot erase a war. A handshake cannot rewrite history.
But they can create the few minutes in which somebody stops thinking about the other side as an abstraction and starts seeing the person sitting opposite them.
That minute can matter.
Sometimes enormously.
Which brings us back to the dinner table.
The great diplomatic meetings of history often looked almost embarrassingly civilized. Vienna had its social whirl. Versailles had its magnificent setting. Yalta had its photographs and formal discussions. Potsdam had its carefully staged postwar negotiations. Camp David had its retreat, cabins and long private conversations.
The rooms were comfortable.
The decisions were not.
And perhaps that is one of civilization's stranger achievements.
We learned to put dangerous people around a table before putting them across a battlefield.
Not always successfully.
Not always fairly.
Not always peacefully.
But often enough to make the table one of humanity's most important inventions.
The battlefield asks who can impose their will.
The diplomatic table asks whether both sides can live with what happens next.
That is a much harder question.
Because victory has a finishing line.
Peace has paperwork.
And paperwork has a habit of outliving the people who sign it.
The people eventually leave the room. The plates are cleared. The flowers are removed. The flags are folded. The photographers go home. The translators stop whispering. The chairs are put back.
The room looks harmless again.
But somewhere in the documents, the maps and the memories, the consequences remain.
The dangerous part of diplomacy was never what was served.
It was what happened after everyone sat down.
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