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 this meeting was to be a step in shaping the future, there could be no more appropriate setting than at sea, even a sea as wild as the one last weekend around Malta. In a world that seemed to be dissolving, where better to meet than in a place with no boundary lines, no familiar landmarks -- and no firm footing?

For Bush, a man most comfortable with the prudent and predictable, the desire to give ballast to the wildly careening events of recent weeks may have been one reason he arrived in Malta with a long list of concrete proposals. Bush also seemed determined to prove to public opinion in the U.S. and Europe that the American President was just as committed to building the peace as his popular Soviet counterpart.

At the Reykjavik summit in 1986, Gorbachev opened the encounter with a list of sweeping arms proposals that kept Ronald Reagan off balance for the rest of their time together. This time it was Bush who produced the printed sheet of specifics almost as soon as he and Gorbachev sat down in the book-lined cardroom of the Soviet cruise liner Maxim Gorky. Putting before him 112 typed pages of items, the President started out nervously, his voice tight. Gorbachev, sitting across from him, listened intently. When Bush finished speaking, nearly one hour later, he had set out what one White House official called "a lot of meat."

In fact much of it consisted of offerings that had been put forward elsewhere, but there were also some choicer cuts. The President reiterated his proposal that the two nations wrap up the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Geneva before the next summit -- which he suggested be held in Washington in June -- and sign an agreement to cut conventional forces in Europe by the end of 1990. Bush offered to end U.S. production of binary chemical weapons when other nations capable of producing chemical killers enter into an international convention banning them. That represents a change from the Administration's position that it would continue to produce a few binary weapons as a defense against outlaw states.

To help the hard-pressed Soviet economy, Bush promised to waive the Jackson- Vanik Amendment, which restricts U.S.-Soviet trade, as soon as the Supreme Soviet concludes legislation permitting free emigration. For the interim, he proposed that the two nations negotiate a new trade treaty in time for the June summit. He also vowed to support observer status for the Soviet Union at the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) talks, a move long sought by the Soviets to help integrate the U.S.S.R. into the world economic system.