Word: presummit
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...trying to make an INF deal contingent on a framework involving SDI. "They are making tougher noises on INF," says a high-ranking Administration official, "but I have no sense that they are relinking." Another U.S. official close to the Geneva talks views Moscow's moves as typical presummit posturing. "Shock diplomacy is what they specialize in," says he. "Backtracking on ) INF linkage would be consistent with the kind of shell game we've come to expect...
...table with the President. Reagan agreed to the meeting partly out of sheer self- confidence. His advisers believe he scored nothing short of a spectacular personal triumph at Geneva and can repeat it in Iceland. Politics entered into his motivation too. Regan judged that a successful presummit summit shortly before next month's congressional elections would allow Reagan to be perceived as a President who got superpower relations back on track, and thus boost his efforts to help Republican campaigners...
...believe summit meetings must be thoroughly prepared. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger insists that U.S.-Soviet tensions "cannot be removed by the personal relationship of two leaders, and it is not in our interest to create the impression that they can be." He adds, "This hurry-up presummit summit is a source of great concern to me." William Hyland, editor of Foreign Affairs, thinks the Iceland meeting is "dangerous" because diplomats are "escalating their disagreements to their bosses, and if their bosses disagree, the whole thing could blow up. I'd say there is a 40% chance it will...
While that may be too pessimistic, the nonsummit, or presummit or whatever, is indeed a risk. American Presidents and Soviet leaders have generally met in the past only after their diplomats had worked out agreements, however minor or ephemeral, for them to formalize. But Reagan and Gorbachev are conferring precisely because their subordinates have not been able to agree, in the hope they can pull off a kind of joint end run around their own diplomatic machineries. Even if all they can do is give the negotiating process a slight personal impetus -- or "impulse," as Gorbachev put it -- and produce...
...that Nicholas Daniloff would quote lines of poetry to mark his release from Soviet imprisonment. Here was an incident that filled the news for a month, that brought the world's two titans into open confrontation, that in the end, perhaps, prodded them to agree on the presummit summit. Yet to cap off those momentous political events, Daniloff, the center of the storm, reached back into art for a poem by Mikhail Lermontov written almost 150 years ago for another world and circumstance. Grant that it was more diplomatic of Daniloff to quote Lermontov's exasperation with Mother Russia than...