Word: summiteering
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Ideally, a summit should produce some formal, leather-bound outcome, like the SALT I treaty that Richard Nixon brought home from his Moscow meeting with Leonid Brezhnev. A summit represents high history, the great encounter above the tree line. It sometimes excites almost sacramental expectations. Geneva produced neither great treaties nor triumphant rhetoric. The gray prose in use for such occasions reported that "the meetings were frank and useful. Serious differences remain." If Geneva represented anything, it was the triumph of candor and realism. No one got carried away...
...each American President, each Kremlin leader, has felt compelled to counter every move by a countermove, every new weapon with a newer weapon, every show of strength with a greater show of strength. The two hands that control the planet's survival may clasp in a show of summit cordiality, but measurable progress to curtail their nuclear arsenals requires far, far more than ceremonial displays of goodwill...
...Reagan and Gorbachev met at the summit last week, the eleventh such meeting between the U.S. and Soviet leaders in the past three decades, they knew, and reminded each other, that there can be no winners in a nuclear war. For two days, as the world warily watched, the two men groped for some kind of human understanding, some way to master the nuclear riddle. Meeting face to face for the first time, Reagan and Gorbachev tried to set some rules to contain the arms race, some guidelines to rein in their rivalries...
...lack of specifics, both sides pronounced themselves satisfied with the summit, and Reagan and Gorbachev toasted peace, their staffs and each other farewell with a glass of champagne. Before heading off to brief the heads of the Soviets' East bloc satellites, assembled in Prague, Gorbachev managed to get in a few parting propaganda points at an unusual 1½-hour press conference. He sternly warned that "all restraint will be blown to the winds" in nuclear competition unless the U.S. pulls back from its antimissile defense efforts...
Reagan, meanwhile, headed to NATO headquarters in Brussels, where he met with 13 leaders of the Western alliance to report on his talks with Gorbachev. The West Europeans evinced considerable relief that the summit had gone as well as it did. Caught in the middle, they had grown apprehensive about the deep superpower chill during Reagan's first term. "Now, after Geneva, there is no need for pessimism," proclaimed West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. "I am an optimist...