The Trouble With Summits

This week's column for TAP argues that the precedent of high-profile US-China bilateral "summits" is a bad one:

Chinese President Hu Jintao's visit to Washington this week is being widely billed in the media as a "summit" with Barack Obama, and that fact may be more important — and more disturbing — than anything that transpires.

It's great that Hu is visiting, of course. But the precedent that such visits should be big-time summits in the style of U.S.-Soviet meetings in their heyday and that major issues should be primarily addressed in bilateral fora is a bad one. Embracing "the summit" may seem appealing in the short term, but Sino-American bilateralism is a poor strategy for a world in which China will all but inevitably amass an economy larger than the United States' in the near future. Our long-term interests are much better served by almost any conceivable decision-making process other than so-called G2 summits with China. The short-term frustrations of pursuing a policy of robust multilateralism should not distract attention from the urgent need to do the hard work.

The core issue, to be a bit flip, is that the United States of America has a posse.

Read the whole thing.