Word: reagans
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Otherwise, Reagan has been sketching a cool and consistent line toward the summit. While Gorbachev wants to focus on arms control, the President will insist on reviewing the full spectrum of U.S.-Soviet differences. What he plans to tell Gorbachev, advisers say, is roughly this: The U.S. does not and will not threaten the Soviet Union militarily or politically. It is the U.S.S.R. that killed détente by its military buildup and its aggressive efforts to spread Communism through the Third World. The U.S. is eager for a fresh start, but that will require modification of the behavior that causes...
...White House is well aware that Gorbachev is likely to respond, as he did to Shultz in Moscow, by reciting a catalog of American sins and Soviet suspicions. But Reagan feels under no pressure, or so his aides insist to journalists, to show any concrete results from the summit. "No deal is better than a bad deal," they quote him as telling them. Indeed, one adviser insists that Reagan is in the strongest pre-summit position of any President since Dwight Eisenhower in 1955.[*] The rationale: the U.S. has rebuilt its military strength, and its economy is prosperous...
Thus in the White House view, Reagan can claim some success from a summit that results in no more than a vigorous argument ending in an agreement to continue negotiations on a variety of subjects at various levels. That would satisfy U.S. public opinion, says one adviser: "People think we ought to talk to the Soviets, ought to talk to them more than we do, but they do not trust the Soviets much...
...Some of Reagan's lieutenants venture that a ho-hum outcome might be acceptable to Gorbachev too. In the U.S. reading, the Soviet leader wants an easing of tensions with the U.S. in order to concentrate on pepping up the Soviet economy, but he has not made clear and perhaps not decided himself how far he is willing to modify Soviet policy to do so. At the moment he needs not only to prove to his colleagues in Moscow's collective leadership that he is not caving in to the U.S., but to keep foreign affairs relatively quiet. Consequently, says...
Even the physical arrangements for the meeting took protracted negotiation. Reagan will arrive Saturday night and proceed to Maison de Saussure, an 18th century estate on Lake Geneva, which will be his residence during the summit. Gorbachev is expected to arrive on Monday and take up residence on the grounds of the Soviet mission to the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva...