Word: summiteer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Given their goals, it was not surprising that their fourth summit revolved around the ceremonial events rather than the one-on-one Reagan-Gorbachev meetings. With the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty ratified, the potential Strategic Arms Reduction Talks treaty bogged down and the Soviets pulling out of Afghanistan, there was not much top-level business to transact -- or at least not much that could get transacted given the constraints. Aides dutifully produced seven agreements, a procedure that has become de rigueur for summits lest they be popularly judged failures. But the agreements mostly concerned such minor matters as nuclear-testing...
Exhilaration is perhaps too strong. The superpower leaders had merely got through a summit that produced no breakthroughs but no backsliding either. Given the angry animosity that for so long divided the U.S. and U.S.S.R., however, that is no small achievement. As Reagan put it in his Guildhall speech, "To those of us who remember the postwar era, all of this is cause for shaking the head in wonder. Imagine, the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union walking together in Red Square, talking about a growing personal friendship." Even when summits end without...
There is something so personal about this summit, the President explains. Systems may be brutish, bureaucrats may fail. But men can sometimes transcend all that, transcend even the forces of history that seem destined to keep them apart. The idea that he would ever go to Moscow was only a dim possibility until he met Gorbachev. Then it sprang to life in an intimate inkling...
...their Geneva summit in 1985, Reagan recalls, "we went down to the pool house which I had prepared and we sat in front of the open fire and talked. On the way back, I turned to him and said, 'You've never been to our country. I'd like you to see it.' And he said, 'All right. I'll go to Washington for a summit. But then let's have another one in Moscow and you can see our country.' When we went back and told the others about two summits they nearly fell out of their chairs. That...
Just as superpowers are doomed to coexist, every summit seems destined to produce, sooner or later, a letdown. That is because the buildup is artificial. Such meetings are, by intent, based on the conceit that relations between traditional adversaries can change profoundly for the better, that they can change quickly, and that they can change as a result of the interaction between the superleaders themselves...