Word: summiteer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...again after months of what diplomats brand "megaphone diplomacy." Indeed, Dobrynin reportedly has been empowered to set a date for a meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze that Shultz has been trying to arrange for months. They would begin preparing a more important meeting: the second Reagan-Gorbachev summit, which is supposed to occur in the U.S. this year...
That would be an encouraging development in view of private growling lately from both sides that they can do very well without another summit, thank you. But even if both sides agree to keep planning for a summit, it will take much more to dispel the sour atmosphere that has developed between the superpowers since the Geneva meeting. In fact it may tax diplomats' ingenuity to keep relations from deteriorating further, and fast...
...many Americans, in Soviet eyes they appear to constitute a coordinated campaign of hostility. "We look upon these actions as defiant and provocative, contrary to the spirit of Geneva," said Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Korniyenko in Moscow. In an interview with an Algerian weekly, Gorbachev complained that the Geneva summit "half opened the door to hope, but this ray of light so frightened the people associated with the U.S. military-industrial complex that they threw their weight against the door to slam it shut." As one Soviet official exploded to an American journalist, "Your side is taking us for gullible...
This sequence culminated with Gorbachev's surprise proposal for a quickie test-ban summit. The Administration is puzzled as to why Gorbachev has invested so much of his personal prestige in a test-ban proposal that he must know is a non-starter. Though there are valid arguments for and against a ban (see box), the Reagan Administration has made it unmistakably clear that, as one White House aide put it, "that bird ain't going to fly." About the best advisers can figure is that the Kremlin has reverted to its old game of trying to drive a wedge...
...prove that he could restore civil, if not exactly harmonious, relations with the Soviets without making any major concessions on SDI. So he was happy to conduct a meeting that was mostly symbol and little substance. He succeeded. After growling that there would be no point to a summit if the U.S. remained adamant on SDI, Gorbachev came anyway and acted amiable. Crows one Reagan adviser: "We gave up almost nothing at Geneva and the world did not come apart. That was an important confidence builder. Gorbachev began to appear less formidable, like his bark was worse than his bite...