Reagan's Leadership and the Atlantic Alliance: Views From Europe and America
European and American scholars and diplomats, writing in 1985, review Reagan's first term. The book is interesting as a measure of perceptions before the Iran/contra affair and the post-Reykjavik disarray in arms control. The editor concludes, for example, that "Reagan stands virtually unchallenged as the leader of the Western Alliance" and that he has used his power, on balance, with wisdom and firmness.
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The next annual economic summit is scheduled to be held in Bonn in May 1985. What follows is a more or less fanciful account of its proceedings--not a prediction of the eventual reality, but a depiction of where present domestic and international economic trends are leading. Foremost among these trends is the growth of the U.S. trade and budget deficits. Conceivably, by next May, the actors at the Bonn Summit will have seen signs that these deficits are being reduced. More likely they will not, and the Summit will open in full awareness of the dangers that these deficits pose to the global economy.
In 1955, just after the summit meeting between President Eisenhower, General Secretary Khrushchev and Prime Minister Bulganin in Geneva, Chip Bohlen, then our ambassador to the Soviet Union, invited my family and me to stay at the American ambassador's residence in Moscow. At that time the British ambassador in Moscow was Sir William Hayter. There was a story that Hayter, when asked what it was like to negotiate with the Russians, had said it was rather like dealing with a defective vending machine. You put in a coin and nothing comes out. There may be some sense in shaking it, you may get your coin back; but there is no point in talking to it.
Relations between Greece and the United States are strained. From the anti-American rhetoric of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and his Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), and after a series of irritating incidents, tensions have developed that pose troublesome questions about the course of Greek policy and Greek relations with the West.

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