Word: summiteer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...summit conference will not take place this winter, as Eisenhower and Macmillan apparently desired. It will instead take place during the spring, as General de Gaulle desired, with the exact time and place at de Gaulle's pleasure. Nikita Khrushchev, who will also attend, has not been consulted about these plans for the diplomatic season, but he is inclined to show up when invited, "any place, any time...
...oracular way, De Gaulle himself gave two other reasons for his desire to postpone a summit. The first is a fundamental disagreement with Britain and the U.S. over what a summit should be. Macmillan, in particular, talks of a series of summits, none of which would be make-or-break. De Gaulle, who believes that familiarity breeds contempt and that a certain modicum of mystery is essential to governing, sees the summit as a single 'grand encounter" that must be "carefully prepared"; as he expressed it in a communiqué last week, there should be an effective reduction...
Specifically, De Gaulle fears that an early summit would be largely concerned with Berlin and the German problem, and that on these issues it would be Britain and the U.S. that would feel the public pressure to make concessions, not Russia. He does not believe Russia has paid the price of admission yet: "Favorable signs should develop in the course of the coming months which the debate in the U.N. and the combination of circumstances in Southeast Asia, the Far East and Africa will provide the opportunity to confirm...
Target: Moscow. Put more simply, De Gaulle's determination to delay the summit centers largely around the conflict that today dominates all of French thinking: the five-year-old Algerian war. He wants the summit to wait until the U.N. General Assembly gets around to its annual debate on Algeria, a debate that last year came within a hairbreadth of ending in U.N. censure of France. But he is not, as some critics supposed, primarily trying to blackmail the U.S. and Britain into supporting France in the U.N. His real target is Moscow...
Once again Charles de Gaulle was making great issues serve French ends. Oddly enough, the other participants in the summit seemed to react with a sigh, not an outburst. Moscow was heard plaintively saying that, like Dwight Eisenhower, it still thought the sooner a summit the better...