summit
A summit is a ritual where the world’s most powerful gather around a table, exchanging endless pleasantries and snacks while adroitly postponing any concrete agreement. Participants declare respect for each other’s national interests, only for their words to evaporate by the time their tea goes cold. The media revels in the spectacle, yet the resulting communique contains nothing but vague commitments. It stands as a quintessential example of the gap between rhetoric and reality, an apparatus destined never to make history.