Now let us talk about 2018 Putin-Trump Summit ::: First US-Russia Summit took place in 1955 .... but world hardly changed .... apparently

Russian President Vladimir Putin's first Summit with Donald Trump was in 2018 in Helsinki.

It was not really successful and produced no agreements.

The met was dominated by controversy at home after Trump cast doubt on US intelligence conclusions about election interference. 

From Geneva in 1955 to Anchorage in 2025, Washington and Moscow summits have been 'less' about friendship than about building guardrails. 

The pattern is consistent: meet, manage the danger and leave enough trust and verification for the next round.

The first summit began at Geneva in July 1955, when President Dwight Eisenhower met Soviet leaders in the first post-Stalin summit. 

It produced no treaty but did reopen channels and floated ideas such as “Open Skies,” the notion of mutual aerial inspection.  

In 959 = that is four years later, Nikita Khrushchev’s trip to the United States culminated in the 1959 Camp David talks.

This was a major breakthrough meet. The bilateral relations had improved much and the episode was better described  as the “spirit of Camp David.”   

Putin also held a Summit meet with Joe Biden in Geneva in June 2021.

Both sides had agreed to return ambassadors, and launched a strategic-stability dialogue touching on arms control and cyber issues. 

Not long after, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine ruptured ties, and in 2023, Moscow said it was suspending participation in New START, leaving the treaty’s future in doubt.

John F. Kennedy

The relaxation proved fragile. John F. Kennedy’s 1961 Vienna encounter with Khrushchev sharpened arguments over Berlin and set a harsher tone for the early 1960s. 

Yet the most enduring product of that era came after the Cuban Missile Crisis—Washington and Moscow installed a direct hotline in 1963 so that the next crisis could be contained before it spiralled.

Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev

With the nuclear dangers still fresh, summits began to deliver hard limits. Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev used the 1972 Moscow summit to sign the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and an interim Strategic Arms Limitation (SALT I) agreement, the first formal caps on parts of the superpowers’ arsenals. 

Jimmy Carter and Brezhnev 

... later signed SALT II in Vienna in 1979, though it was never ratified after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev

The late-Cold-War burst of summitry then reset the trajectory. Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev’s meetings at Geneva (1985) and Reykjavík (1986) nearly leapt toward radical cuts, and the 1987 Washington summit produced the INF Treaty eliminating an entire class of ground-launched missiles. 

George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev met at Malta in 1989 to mark an end to Cold War confrontation and followed with conventional and strategic cuts that carried into the 1990

After the USSR’s collapse, the fledgling Russian Federation sought to lock in a different relationship. 

In January–February 1992, Boris Yeltsin’s first U.S. visit spanned New York and Camp David; Bush and Yeltsin declared the Cold War over. 

Bill Clinton and Yeltsin

The momentum continued with Bill Clinton and Yeltsin: START II was signed in Moscow in January 1993, and the 1997 Helsinki meeting laid guidelines for further cuts and stressed preserving the ABM framework. 

Cooperation deepened even as arguments over NATO enlargement and the Balkans intruded.

The 2000s mixed personal diplomacy with new constraints. 

George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin repeatedly, from Ljubljana in 2001 to Bratislava in 2005. The signature outcome was the 2002 Moscow Treaty (SORT), which capped each side’s deployed strategic warheads at 1,700–2,200.  

Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev

In the 2010s, summitry grew sparse but still mattered. Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev signed New START in Prague in 2010, driving deployed strategic warheads down to 1,550 and restoring rigorous inspections. 

ends