The onging summit between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping has been billed as a “high-stakes” meeting which the US president says will have a major focus on artificial intelligence (AI).

Trump told a gathering of world leaders at the US general assembly on Tuesday that, “whoever wins superintelligence wins … and we’re leading now over China by a lot”. Quite how this will help build rapport between the two leaders is anyone’s guess.

Leaving aside for now the US president’s decision to unilaterally rename (as is his wont) what everyone else calls artificial intelligence, there’s no doubt that what the world needs now is for Xi and Trump to do what they can to avoid an AI arms race.

Nicholas Wheeler and Marcus Holmes, whose research focus is on face-to-face diplomacy, believe the scale of this challenge recalls the summits between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s. At that stage it was nuclear proliferation which was scaring people on both sides of the cold war. Fresh in Soviet minds were the Nato exercises which gamed out a scenario in which the Soviet Union invaded eastern Europe, to which the response was a nuclear retaliation.

Meeting in Geneva in November 1985, the two leaders – Reagan the dyed-in-the-wool anti-communist and Gorbachev, the passionate Marxist-Leninist – somehow developed a rapport which fostered an effective working relationship. As Wheeler and Holmes recount, the pair were able to appreciate that both of their countries shared a very real fear of nuclear proliferation.

This understanding enabled them to collaborate on a series of nuclear deals which pulled the world back from the precipice. The hope is that Trump and Xi, arguably the world’s........

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