Talking Points on the Malta Meeting

President George H. W. Bush held his first summit with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev early in December 1989 onboard a Soviet cruise ship docked off the coast of Malta. Although US-Soviet relations had thawed during the second term of President Ronald Reagan as he and Gorbachev developed a personal rapport, signed the first treaty between the superpowers to reduce nuclear weapons arsenals, and moved forward on further arms negotiations, Bush’s presidency began with a “pause” in diplomacy with the Soviets as his administration formulated a new foreign policy that came to be characterized by the slogan “beyond containment,” one that sought to encourage a “significant shift in the Soviet Union” and that would allow “the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations.” At the Malta summit, Bush presented some twenty initiatives, including efforts to normalize trade and move forward on arms control agreements. Although the two did not see eye-to-eye on every issue—Bush refused Gorbachev’s request to begin talks on naval arms control; Gorbachev assured Bush that Nicaragua had denied they were supplying arms to Salvadoran rebels, while Bush insisted they were continuing to do so—at the conclusion of the talks, Gorbachev told Bush that the Soviet Union was “ready no longer to regard the United States as an adversary.” The following State Department memo summarizes the points discussed during the summit.