Business After Malta

Except for the weather, which was the stormiest to bang at Malta in a decade, this was the No Surprise Summit. Yet rarely has the very lack of surprise prompted more applause. The world, and certainly both superpowers, wanted a summit meeting that had “business as usual” stamped all over it; people wanted the two superpower leaders to get to work in a calm businesslike fashion. No megaproposals out of left, or even right, field, please. Just make the world a better, safer place, thank you very much. And that’s precisely what President Bush and Soviet President Gorbachev appear to be purposefully striding towards.

Not only can the two leaders do business with each other, there’s evidence that the business volume is to be increased dramatically. A full-fledged nuclear arms control summit is on tap for June. Negotiations to reduce conventional forces in Europe will speed up. The extraordinary complexities of an agreement to ban chemical weapons will be attacked. This move on chemical warfare represents a major and highly commendable concession by Bush.

The U.S. also promised to help Moscow obtain its longtime goal of observer status at GATT (the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs)--yet another switch in Administration policy. It’s true that the superpower leaders failed to make any progress on the contentious issues of naval arms control and Soviet involvement in Central America, but in the now-patented cool-cucumber ah-shucks Bush style they low-keyed this whole business as best they could.

The eyeball-to-eyeball chemistry between the leaders was evident in their joint press conference--as if two CEOs were discoursing calmly about the possibility of a business upturn. It is devoutly to be wished that this superpower chemistry is bankable and that both sides will be able to draw on it in the months to come. The rapidly evolving events in Eastern Europe and elsewhere continue to astonish. The two leaders apparently agreed not to try to micromanage the German situation but to leave it to history, as it were. Lots of luck, there. Just yesterday East German leader Egon Krenz and the entire Communist party leadership resigned, leaving the fate of that country to an interim panel of reformers--and, one supposes, “history.” But history is not always efficient, nor does it always produce results that the world is comfortable with--much like the weather in normally pacific Malta.