Famous summits from U.S. presidential history

The Yalta Summit of 1945 took place in the seaside town of Yalta in Crimea. Russia, the United States, and Great Britain met to formally end World War II. The Russians would occupy most of Eastern Europe for decades after during the Cold War.

President Nixon’s 1972 trip to China was the first time an American president had visited the People’s Republic of China. The visit alone heralded an end to two decades of non-diplomatic relations between the countries. The meeting brought the countries closer together, and some diplomats have said it established China as the player on the global stage it is today.

After weeks of name-calling, President Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un met in Singapore in 2018. It was the first meeting ever between the leaders of the two countries and involved discussions of denuclearisation and Korean reunification.

President John F. Kennedy met Nikita Khrushchev in 1961 to discuss the brewing Cold War. Kennedy later called the meeting one of the worst experiences of his life. He spent time debating Marxism with Khrushchev, and it was said the Soviet leader basically “walked all over him.”

Ronald Reagan met with Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 to discuss ending the Soviet-American nuclear arms race. Although few tangible policy outcomes came out of the summit, it was still considered a breakthrough for Soviet-American relations, based on the warm relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev, which established the groundwork for negotiations in the years to come.

Unique among presidential summits was the Hampton Roads Summit of 1865. President Abraham Lincoln met with three generals from the breakaway Confederate States to discuss ending the Civil War. The summit was a failure, as the generals had not been authorized to accept any outcome other than Southern independence, which Lincoln would not accept.

President Jimmy Carter persuaded Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to meet at Camp David in 1978 to try and establish the elusive goal of peace in the Middle East. The Accords were a major breakthrough that established peace between Egypt and Israel after decades of conflict.

President George H. W. Bush met Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in Malta as communist regimes around Europe were collapsing, and the end of the Soviet Union seemed potentially nigh. The two men established a warm rapport during the summit that eased the end of the war.

President Harry S. Truman’s 1945 participation in the Potsdam Conference shortly following the death of his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, set the tone for the next decade. Truman, a straightforward Missourian distrusting of grand gestures and displays, was highly put off by what he saw as propaganda speeches by Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and British ally Winston Churchill. Truman’s lack of enthusiasm effectively relegated summits to a low priority and dimmed communication channels between the East and West as the Cold War commenced.

President Gerald Ford traveled to Vladivostok in 1974 to discuss arms control with his Soviet counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev. The two landed on the agreement that they would have roughly an equal number of arms, theoretically giving neither country an offensive advantage over the other.

The 1909 meeting between President William Howard Taft and his Mexican counterpart, Porfirio Díaz, was the first of its kind between the United States and Mexico. The two met in the disputed territory of El Paso, which was temporarily declared a neutral zone. No policy was officially discussed, but reports suggest the basis of a treaty of arbitration was laid in a conversation between the two men.

President Woodrow Wilson became the first sitting U.S. president to travel to Europe when he arrived at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The conference negotiated the terms of Axis surrender in World War I, including economic reparations to be paid by Germany. The summit also laid the groundwork for the United Nations predecessor, the League of Nations.

While attending the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson took a brief trip to Rome to become the first sitting American president to meet with a pope. The two men saw each other as rivals for the chief postwar peacemaker of the world. The meeting was largely ceremonial and included prayer. Both would die at the same young age of 67 relatively soon thereafter.

President Calvin Coolidge traveled to Cuba in 1928 to extend an olive branch and try to make diplomatic inroads with Latin American leaders upset about America’s intervention in the region. It was the only time in his life President Coolidge traveled outside the United States.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower traveled to Geneva in 1955 to meet with his counterparts from the Soviet Union, France, and Britain. This was the first meeting of the four major world powers since the end of World War II. Although no major policy changes emerged, the summit had the effect of cooling tensions that had been running very high during the Cold War.

President Barack Obama attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in 2016. There, he met with world leaders and outlined the United States’ position in what would become the historic Paris Climate Accord.

President Lyndon B. Johnson met with his Soviet counterpart on American soil in 1967 at what is known as the Glassboro Summit. The aim of the meeting was to discuss events in the Middle East, the Vietnam War, and other key issues. No specific breakthroughs came from the meeting, but Johnson described the meeting as being warm and in good spirit, which would pave the way for more cooperation on issues like nuclear weapons in the coming decade.

Richard Nixon arrived in Moscow at the height of the Cold War in 1972 to meet with his counterpart, Leonid Brezhnev. One of the most consequential policies to come out of the meeting was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, which limited both nations’ anti-ballistic missile arsenals.

In 2008, President George W. Bush hosted the presidents of Mexico and Canada in New Orleans. Free trade was a major topic at the summit, with the leaders of each country defending the policy in spite of pushback among some workers at home.

In 1994, President Bill Clinton attended one of the first NATO summits since the end of the Cold War. There, the president committed to keeping 100,000 troops in Europe, despite the war's end.