Geneva regains diplomatic spotlight with Putin-Biden summit

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A year ago, Geneva was largely down on its diplomatic luck: The Trump administration had an “America First” policy that เข้าเล่นสล็อตxo shunned the internationalism the Swiss city epitomizes, and blasted some of its top institutions like the World Health Organization, the Human Rights Council and. the World Trade Organization.

That's all in the past.

The lakeside city, known as a Cold War crossroads and a hub for Swiss discretion, neutrality and humanitarianism, returns to a spotlight on the world stage Wednesday as U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin come to town for a summit.

It will mark the third time that Geneva has hosted US and Russian leaders' talks: The first was a multilateral meeting involving US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1955. The second came 30 years later, when President Ronald Reagan met. Mikhail Gorbachev — an important icebreaker that some say paved the way toward the end of the Soviet Union.

Both times, the two sides made progress toward defusing tensions. This time, hopes loom for even a modest improvement on the current U.S.-Russia chill over issues like Ukraine, human rights and cyber attacks.

Soviet and Russian studies expert Robert Legvold, a professor emeritus at Columbia University, said Geneva hosted crucial U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic nuclear arms control and has had a relatively good track record as a venue where the two countries can cooperate.

If there’s any city “where business has been done ... it has been Geneva,” Legvold said of the two rival countries.

Legvold noted how Eisenhower used the 1955 meeting to launch what became known as the “Open Skies” agreement, which called for U.S. and Soviet militaries to exchange maps to boost transparency and defuse tensions.

That eventually led to a treaty in 1992, which let each country carry out surveillance flights over the other's territory. Under Trump, the U.S. pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty, and the Biden administration announced last month that the U.S. would not rejoin it — alleging repeated Russian violations.

Putin has lamented the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” and has sought to rebuild Russia's Soviet-era global clout and prestige. He often has been critical of Gorbachev's legacy, saying that the U.S. and its Western allies cheated the Soviet Union by pledging not to expand NATO eastward following the reunification of Germany — and then breaking their promise.