1989

Malta Summit

Bush and Gorbachev conclude the Malta Summit

A Mediterranean storm scrambled the choreography so badly that Bush dismissed protocol and crossed from an American warship to the Soviet liner.

Marsaxlokk Harbor, 3 December 1989

George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev closed their informal 2–3 December summit aboard the Soviet passenger liner Maxim Gorky in Marsaxlokk Harbor, Malta. The listing carries only the year 1989; the concluding day is securely dated to 3 December.

Severe weather wrecked the planned ship-to-ship arrangements. Bush told reporters the venue did not matter and travelled from USS Belknap to the Maxim Gorky; Gorbachev reported about eight hours of discussion.

The first joint press conference

Bush said the talks had set the stage for cooperation and for overcoming Europe’s division and military confrontation. Asked whether the Cold War had ended, Gorbachev said both sides believed the world was leaving one Cold War epoch and entering another — while stressing this was only the beginning of a long peaceful period.

Malta was not the first postwar meeting of the two countries’ leaders: Reagan and Gorbachev alone had held four summits between 1985 and 1988.

No treaty, and no named invasion

Answering a Czechoslovak journalist, Gorbachev said every nation was independent and every people had the right to choose its own destiny; Bush replied that this laid previous interventionist doctrines to rest. Gorbachev did not name the 1968 invasion, and the explicit Warsaw Pact condemnation of it came in Moscow the next day, 4 December.

The leaders discussed strategic, conventional and chemical-arms negotiations and assigned follow-up work, but the summit produced no formal treaty or agreement.

Whether Malta ended the Cold War is contested: some scholars treat it as central, others as a missed opportunity or a catalytic meeting that achieved little concrete on its own.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date corrected

How this was checked

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Date corrected. The research places this at 1989-12-03.

What the sources leave uncertain

The exact date is not uncertain: the summit concluded on December 3. The listed year-only date should be upgraded to 1989-12-03.
Whether Malta itself “ended the Cold War” is interpretive and disputed. Some scholars regard it as central; others call it a missed opportunity or a catalytic meeting that achieved little concrete by itself.
Gorbachev did not explicitly name the 1968 invasion in the Malta press conference. His rejection of intervention and affirmation of national choice implied repudiation of the Brezhnev Doctrine. The formal Warsaw Pact condemnation came in Moscow on December 4.