International relations theory has had a trust revival, with scholars focusing on how trust can enhance interpersonal cooperation attempts between leaders. We propose there is another type of trust at play in world politics. International system trust is a feeling of confidence in the international social order, which is indexed especially by trust in its central unit, state persons. System trust anchors ontological security, and its presence is an unstated assumption of the international relations trust scholarship. In this paper we conceptualize system trust. We illuminate its presence by flagging the production of state personhood in a familiar case in international relations trust scholarship, the 1985 Geneva Summit between Reagan and Gorbachev. Interpersonal and system trust perspectives highlight different aspects of the same summit. The juxtaposition suggests new lines of research into the production of state persons in diplomacy, the relationship between interpersonal and system trust, and the impact of the rise of personalistic/patrimonial leadership on diplomacy and international order.

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Summary The recent revival in the interest in summitry in International Relations scholarship conceptualises it as an elite-centred or foreign policy-focused process targeting foreign governments and publics. This article makes a theoretical intervention on the effects of summitry by foregrounding publics as audiences of international politics who can exercise agency. Because summits are primarily elite-staged performances of Westphalian principles of state sovereignty, they generate a political space for audiences to publicly embrace or contest summitry performances and their meanings of sovereignty. They can do so by co-performing with or by counter-performing elitist summitry performances, which can generate narratives with potential to shape and alter domestic societies in the long run.

This paper analyzes the motives behind China's proposal of the "New Model of Major Country Relations" to the U.S in June 2013 and its effect on China-U.S relations. The timing and the contents of the proposal shows that that China proposed this discourse to the U.S as a way of challenging conventional discourse in international relations regarding the possibility of a war between rising and established powers. By doing so, China was seeking to mitigate the heightening distrust that has been accumulating since 2009. China's proposal however, did not improve China-U.S relations as American suspicions and distrust only increased as China failed to meet the American expectations. This paper concludes that China and the U.S did not converge in terms of how they would interact with each other under this new model of relations because of different interpretations of the contents of the new model of major country relations.