U.S. Plans for Upcoming Meetings with Soviet Leaders

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 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. Gorbachev especially looked favorably on Bush’s proposals to take incremental steps to normalize trade relations between the two countries during a period in which the Soviet Union was experiencing a decline in industrial production and the purchasing power of the ruble. As indicated in the following excerpts of a State Department internal memo to Secretary James Baker on preparing for the next summit and the Secretary’s upcoming meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, disagreements between the two sides regarding “regional issues”—Cuban and Nicaraguan support for Salvadoran rebels and Soviet reluctance to force the puppet regime in Afghanistan to relinquish power—as well as disputes within the Bush administration itself remained to be resolved.