America and Russia return to traditional great-power diplomacy

JOE BIDEN was 12 in 1955 when Dwight Eisenhower sat down in Geneva with Nikita Khrushchev for the first bilateral summit between the leaders of America and the Soviet Union. The current American president was a 42-year-old senator working on arms control when Ronald Reagan sat on a sofa with Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time in the same city, taking what turned out to be the first step towards ending the cold war.On June 16th it was Mr Biden’s turn to encounter Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, who has undermined many of the achievements of the post-cold-war order and revived some of the worst Soviet practices. But although the location was the same, the plot was different. This was not a summit between two superpowers holding the fate of the world in their hands. Nor was it an attempt to have another reset of the relationship, as Barack Obama tried. Rather it was something a bit murkier.