East-West: Turning Visions Into Reality

By the time George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in Malta, there was no longer any pretense that this was to be a meeting where they simply sat back and talked. How do you put your feet up when the deck beneath you is trembling and the winds are howling, in Marsaxlokk Bay and throughout the tattered Soviet empire? This first Bush-Gorbachev summit, which the American President initially proposed as a way to restart the becalmed U.S.-Soviet relationship, was now also the first to take place in the uncertain new world ushered in by the upheavals shaking Eastern Europe. And if...