I think we all missed a beat when the Queen, resplendent in green, said: “None of us will live forever.” However, she was on shakier ground in telling her fellow heads of state: “History has shown that when nations come together in common cause there is always room for hope.” If only!
Many of the world’s greatest catastrophes have followed international summits. The Second World War was preceded by the Munich conference of September 1938, which made the appeasement crisis worse and may ultimately have caused the very world war it was seeking to avert. It certainly convinced Hitler that the democracies were fundamentally weak and disunited—he had utter contempt for Chamberlain and his umbrella—while persuading the German military leadership that the Führer had the Midas touch.
It was the same at the other end of the war. The Yalta and Potsdam conferences of February-July 1945 sealed the fate of Poland—along with most of central and eastern Europe—as a giant colony and labour camp for Stalin, while convincing the Soviet dictator, like Hitler before him, of the weak, decadent and disunited nature of the western powers.
It was only the extraordinary leadership of Ernest Bevin, who arrived as the new British foreign secretary midway through the conference, after the change of government in Britain’s July 1945 election, that prevented Potsdam and its aftermath from being even worse. Ernie, who knew a thing or two about communist thugs from his decades as a trade union leader, started shouting at Stalin about his designs on western Germany, which led the Soviet leader to absent himself from later sessions because of a “cold.” I tell the story in my new book on political leadership out next month—It’s the Leader, Stupid.
It wasn’t an international summit that ultimately stopped Stalin’s westward advance across Europe, but rather the Berlin airlift of 1948/9. This overcame Stalin’s siege of the German capital that had begun after a string of talks broke down because Bevin wouldn’t agree to (in effect) surrender the western zones of Berlin to Russia.
One big lesson stands out from my study of history. It’s generally a bad idea to negotiate face-to-face with megalomaniacal dictators. You either get worsted or—even worse—you fall for their charisma, as, alas, Churchill did to an alarming extent with Stalin in 1944/5. “I love that man,” he said after one long drinking session with the bluff and manipulative Soviet leader. The godsend is that Churchill never met Hitler in the 1930s.
However, all this makes me more, not less, optimistic about Glasgow and COP26. And for one reason: Xi and Putin aren’t there, but virtually everyone else is. In particular, the president of the United States—leader of what is still by far the world’s greatest power—is present, and on the climate change issue supports common sense, not dangerous denial.
This situation is a big net plus for net zero. It makes a serious international agreement more likely, because the Chinese and Russian dictators don’t have to be appeased to their faces, yet ultimately they will probably fall in line with a deal out of political and commercial self-interest as much as any desire to live forever (an attribute, if I dare contradict Her Majesty, that most dictators do possess).
Of course, there will be alarums and excursions. Near-breakdowns, maybe a total breakdown, before something is salvaged either at one minute to midnight on the last day, or at COP27 or COP28 or at a G7 gathering hereafter.
I was particularly amused by this account of COP21 in Paris in 2015, by former British climate change official Mo Hussein: “Negotiations went to the wire, often beginning around midnight and finishing in the early hours. The days were about countries working out their negotiating positions in smaller bubbles. Towards the end, our French hosts took away food and water, no doubt to try and get things over the line.”
Moreover, the critical issue at stake in the COP26 negotiations, while it has huge policy implications, is simple to grasp in headline terms, being essentially the difference between two numbers in respect of global warming. All countries committed in the 2015 Paris agreement to limit global warming to below 2C compared with pre-industrial times and to “pursue efforts” to limit it to 1.5C.
Since then, greater scientific understanding of the severe impacts of warming above 1.5C has prompted countries most vulnerable to climate change to demand that this “aspirational target” is achieved, through widespread commitment to bolder policies and an earlier date to achieve net-zero carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, one of the great dictators—at least, a would-be dictator—is present in Glasgow: Narendra Modi. His speech on the first day deliberately and provocatively committed only to net zero by 2070. It would have been better if he had stayed away, in a huddle with Xi and Putin.
