A bilateral on the margins — frequently shortened in diplomatic cables to "bilat on the margins" or simply "pull-aside" when briefer — denotes a formally scheduled two-party meeting between principals that takes place during, but is administratively separate from, a multilateral gathering such as the UN General Assembly High-Level Week, a G7 or G20 leaders' summit, the NATO Heads of State and Government meeting, the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, or the Munich Security Conference. The practice has no codified treaty basis; it rests instead on the customary diplomatic prerogative, recognized in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961) and reinforced by the protocol manuals of major foreign ministries, of states to conduct direct intergovernmental business wherever their representatives are physically convened. The format emerged as a pragmatic response to the proliferation of multilateral summitry after 1945 and became routine after the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Helsinki in 1975, where Cold War adversaries used the corridors to transact business their public agendas would not accommodate.
Procedurally, a margins bilateral begins with a request transmitted through the requesting state's embassy in the host country or directly between sherpa-level coordinators in the weeks before the summit. The receiving delegation's chief of staff and protocol officer review the principal's program — already densely scheduled with plenary statements, host-country events, and required multilateral pull-asides — and propose a window, conventionally between 20 and 45 minutes. Once agreed, the meeting is added to both delegations' schedules, a venue is allocated (a holding room at the conference center, a hotel suite, or a bilateral room set aside by the host), interpreters are confirmed, and a notetaker from each side is designated. Substantive preparation produces a briefing book containing talking points, a one-page biography of the counterpart, sensitivities to avoid, and a "deliverable" — a sentence or two intended for the post-meeting readout.
The meeting itself follows a compressed version of full bilateral choreography. Principals enter through separate doors or sequentially, exchange handshakes for the press pool that is admitted for a brief "spray" of perhaps 30 to 90 seconds during which opening pleasantries are exchanged, and then the room is cleared of media. The substantive portion proceeds with each principal flanked by two to four advisers — typically the foreign minister or national security adviser, a regional director, and a notetaker. Interpretation is consecutive unless simultaneous booths are available. Following the meeting, each side issues a readout: the host delegation's spokesperson briefs traveling press, while the foreign ministry capital publishes a more formal statement. Discrepancies between the two readouts — what was said about Taiwan, what was promised on arms transfers, whether a phrase such as "constructive" or "frank" appears — are themselves diplomatic signals.
Recent practice illustrates the form's centrality. At the G20 Bali Summit in November 2022, U.S. President Joseph Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a three-hour bilateral on the margins — their first in-person meeting as heads of state — which produced the agreement to reopen military-to-military communications channels later suspended after the August 2022 Pelosi visit to Taipei. At UNGA High-Level Week each September, the U.S. Secretary of State conducts thirty or more margins bilaterals at the Waldorf Astoria's successor venue and the U.S. Mission on First Avenue. The Munich Security Conference of February 2023 produced a margins meeting between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Director Wang Yi shortly after the surveillance balloon incident. APEC Lima in November 2024 and the G20 Rio summit the same month likewise produced dense bilateral programs running in parallel with the formal plenaries.
A margins bilateral should be distinguished from a state visit, which is the most formal category of bilateral engagement — involving a head-of-state invitation, military honors, a state banquet, and typically a joint communiqué negotiated over weeks — and from a working visit or official visit, which lacks ceremonial elements but is hosted in a capital with the visiting principal as the day's primary guest. It is also distinct from a pull-aside, a more informal and shorter (5–15 minute) encounter often arranged the same day in a corridor or holding room without a formal agenda, and from a trilateral, which involves three parties simultaneously and requires more elaborate seating and interpretation arrangements.
Edge cases generate genuine diplomatic difficulty. When the United States and Iran both attend UNGA, the absence of a bilateral on the margins is itself the news; the same holds for Israeli and Saudi principals before the Abraham Accords normalization track. The decision by one party to decline a requested margins meeting — as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Western counterparts have repeatedly done since February 2022 — communicates policy without requiring public statement. Hybrid and virtual formats introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic created the anomaly of "virtual bilaterals on the margins" of virtual summits, a construction that strained the geographic metaphor but persisted. Disputes over photo composition, flag placement, and seating order have on occasion derailed otherwise agreed meetings.
For the working practitioner, mastery of the margins bilateral is operational. Desk officers draft the request cable; embassy political sections lobby for the slot; sherpas and sous-sherpas trade meetings as bargaining chips in the weeks before a summit; spokespersons calibrate readouts to the comma. A successful margins bilateral can crystallize months of preparatory work into a single deliverable; a botched one — a missed nuance, a leaked talking point, an unanticipated press question — can set a relationship back by quarters. Understanding the form, its rhythms, and its semiotics is therefore a baseline competence for anyone working a bilateral relationship within a multilateral calendar.
Example
At the G20 Bali Summit in November 2022, U.S. President Joseph Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a three-hour bilateral on the margins, their first in-person meeting as heads of state.