a day before the meeting began, Mr. Bush squeezed in one more golf game on
Wednesday morning, and left that night. But here, it seemed that the bottomless well of
energy had a bottom after all. Mr. Bush got off Air Force One looking tired, eyes puffy
and his stride less spry than the "spring colt" to which he always compares himself.
During the London summit, Bush appears to have been unusually irritable. One small
crisis came when he found himself waiting for his limousine in front of Lancaster House
while his aides scrambled to bring his car around. Bush "craned his neck around, pursed
his lips, stuck his hands in his pockets, and glared at the nearest aide until his car finally
appeared." [fn 27]
The secret agenda at this summit was dominated by the NATO out of area deployments,
transforming the alliance into the white man's vengeful knout against the third world.
According to a senior NATO consultant, the Lancaster House summit focussed on
"increasing tension and re-armament in a number of countries, in North Africa, the
Middle East including Palestine, and Asia through, increasingly, to Southeast Asia. There
are new dangers from new directions. We are shifting from an exclusive focus on the
east-west conflict, to a situation of risk coming eventually or potentially from all
directions." The talk in London in that July was about a possible new Middle East war,
which "would tend to escalate horizontally and vertically. A real conflict in the Levant
would extend from the Turkish border to the Suez canal. It would involve the neighbors
of the main combatants. The whole thing would be in a state of flux, because the great
powers couldn't afford just to sit there." In order to avoid public relations problems for
the continental European governments, who still had qualms about their domestic public
opinion, these debates were not featured in the final communique, which complacently
proclaimed the end of the Cold War and invited Gorbachov to come and visit NATO
headquarters to make a speech. [fn 28]
After hob-nobbing with Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth II, and other members of the royal
family, Bush flew to Houston to assume the role of host of the Group of 7 yearly
economic summit. At this summit, the Anglo-Saxon master race as represented by Bush
and Thatcher found itself in a highly embarrassing position. Everyone knew that the
worst economic plague outside of the communist bloc was the English-speaking
economic depression, which held not just the United States, the United Kingdom, and
Canada but also Australia, New Zealand, and other former imperial outposts in its grip.
The continental Europeans were interested in organizing emergency aid and investment
packages for the emerging countries of eastern Europe, and the Soviet republics, but this
the Anglo-Saxons adamantly opposed. Rather, Bush and Thatcher were on a full trade-
war line against the European Community and Japan when it came to the General
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and other matters of international economics. Bush's
Tex-Mex menus and country and western entertainment programs were unable to hide an
atmosphere of growing animosity.
In the following week, the Anglo-Saxon supermen were once again plunged into gloom
when Gorbachov and Kohl, meeting on July 16 in the south Russian town of Mineralny
Vody near Stavropol, announced the Soviet acquiescence to the membership of united