Philosophical discussions

Andrei Grachev, a former adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, writes about philosophical Bush - Gorbachev exchanges during the Malta summit as he explains how, in his view, the West let Moscow down. From the Herald Tribune:

..To prove to President George H.W. Bush when they met in Malta in December 1989 that he had "crossed the Rubicon" - that he believed the conflict between East and West and the "absurd" confrontation between the USSR and the USA were totally at an end - he not only told Bush that the Soviet Union no longer regarded the United States as its enemy, but, breaking with the long strategic line of Soviet diplomacy, he declared that Moscow looked on the presence of American troops in Europe as a positive contribution toward global stability.

Gorbachev also told me that he and President Bush spent some time in Malta on a separate, almost philosophical discussion of the values on which a new world would be built after the Cold War. But when Bush spoke of the victory of "Western values," Gorbachev argued that he regarded democracy, the primacy of law and human rights not only as Western, but as universal values...