Copyright 1992 The Washington Post
The Washington Post
August 14, 1992, Friday, Final Edition
SECTION: FIRST SECTION; PAGE A19
LENGTH: 2099 words
HEADLINE: Baker Pressed for Mideast Peace, German Unification
SERIES: Occasional
BYLINE: David Hoffman, Washington Post Staff Writer
BODY:
In moving to the White House to become chief of staff, Secretary of State
James A. Baker III leaves behind major
accomplishments in advancing Middle East peace negotiations, helping secure German unification
and building the international coalition that went to war against Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein.
But Baker's 3 1/2-year record as America's chief diplomat is also marked by
major crises that he failed to focus on until it was too late, including the
civil war in Yugoslavia and Iraq's menacing behavior before its invasion of
Kuwait.
Baker's foreign policy legacy can be divided into two periods: an initial one
in which the United States took increasingly extroverted and aggressive stands
abroad, extending through the Persian Gulf War; and a second phase when
Americans generally showed less
interest in world affairs and the administration adopted a more inward-looking
posture.
Baker's tenure at the State Department coincided with the collapse of the
Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, one of this century's most
important developments. Baker and his longtime friend and partner in foreign
policy, President Bush, responded to the Soviet breakup with characteristic
caution and reactive, step-by-step pragmatism.
After initial hesitation, they exploited improved relations with Moscow,
sealing major agreements on reducing conventional and strategic arms and
resolving regional conflicts from Nicaragua to Angola. Even after the breakup
of the Soviet Union, Baker managed to negotiate still-deeper nuclear arms cuts.
But he and Bush were slow to recognize the devolution of power to the
republics, and the eventual downfall of Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, on
whom they had placed their hopes.
Bush declared the advent of a New World Order at the zenith of the Persian Gulf
crisis, but neither he nor Baker ever articulated much of a working philosophy
to fill out the slogan. Rather, they have carried out foreign policy on a
case-by-case basis. Although they went to war, for instance, to oppose
"unprovoked aggression" against Kuwait, they have largely stood on the sidelines in the face of
Serbia's
bloody aggression against Bosnia-Hercegovina.
Skillful Negotiator
Baker enjoys wide respect around the globe for his extraordinary negotiating
talents and his steely perseverance. He brought to diplomacy the same lust for
a winning strategy and crafty tactics that marked his earlier years as a
political manager.
But he also has been criticized for applying these efforts to only a few
high-priority issues, often to the exclusion of other problems vital to U.S.
interests.
In the past two years, for example, Baker invested his energy heavily in the
Middle East peace process and in Russia, while devoting almost no time to Asia,
and particularly Japan. He was intensely involved in negotiations on German
unification in the summer of 1990, but was so preoccupied with East-West
affairs that he failed to grasp the trouble brewing in Iraq, and
apparently did not see, or ignored, signs that the administration's policy of
engaging the Iraqi dictator was going awry.
As a confidant of the president, Baker exercised commanding authority as the
nation's chief diplomat. But he refused to delegate responsibility to more than
a handful of his most trusted advisers. This management style enhanced his
control over policy, but also left him vulnerable to missed opportunities.
It is impossible to separate Baker's record from that of Bush, a president who
in his first three years was deeply and personally involved in foreign policy.
From the start, Baker had little experience in diplomacy while Bush considered
it his forte.
At times, such as crafting a response to the Tiananmen Square massacre of
pro-democracy students in China, Bush seems to have virtually assumed control
over the smallest details of policy-making, while Baker kept a
low profile. At other times, such as negotiating the start of Middle East peace
talks, Baker appears to have been the driving force and operated with a free
hand.
The two have been in daily contact for years, and it is often difficult to
separate their thinking. Baker tends to be more disciplined, Bush more
avuncular. Baker seems to thrive on gamesmanship and backroom strategy; Bush
enjoys -- and dominates -- summitry and the international spotlight.
Attuned to Public Opinion
Throughout his tenure at Foggy Bottom, Baker never lost his appetite for the
smallest details of domestic politics, including Bush's poll ratings and the
president's performance, although in public Baker wanted to be viewed as a
statesman, far removed from the nitty-gritty of partisan combat. Baker, a
pragmatic politician with little patience for ideology or rigidity, was keenly
attuned to both public
opinion and congressional sentiment, and guided many decisions by what he
judged could win approval on Capitol Hill.
During his first formal news conference at the State Department, Baker
responded to Democratic congressional criticism of the administration's China
policy by noting that the president
"is rocking along with a 70 percent approval rating on his handling of foreign
policy."
A high-ranking adviser to Baker said the best way to understand the chemistry
between Baker and Bush was to look at their respective roles in the gulf
crisis.
"The difference between Baker and Bush," he said,
"is that Bush could not have built the coalition, and Baker could not have made
the decision to go to war."
While Bush made the ultimate decision to use force against Iraq, Baker made it
possible by assembling an international coalition that included Arab states and
the Soviet
Union.
In a furious, 166-day diplomatic blitz, Baker helped put in place an approach
against Saddam known among specialists as
"coercive diplomacy." By imposing sanctions on Iraq and also mounting a military buildup, the allies
hoped to persuade Saddam to pull his forces out of Kuwait. Baker engineered
approval of a key U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force if Saddam did
not withdraw.
Both Baker and Bush sometimes had difficulty, however, articulating why the
United States should use force to save Kuwait. Baker was widely criticized for
a condescending tone at one point when he said the
"economic lifeline" of the West was at stake and
"to bring it down to the average American citizen, let me say that means jobs."
But as a diplomat, Baker proved extraordinarily agile, weaving together
individual
demands of the coalition partners. To bring Syria into the group, he went to
Damascus, easing the sense of isolation of Syrian President Hafez Assad. Egypt
won U.S. forgiveness for military debts. Turkey received textile concessions.
And the Soviet Union, then still expecting to hold together, earned a
long-sought place in regional diplomacy.
Baker's gulf crisis diplomacy ended in a climactic six-hour meeting with Iraqi
Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva, where the U.S. secretary warned that
Iraq would be defeated, but Iraq refused to budge. Baker's coercive diplomacy
failed to avert war, but the coalition he built held firm as the conflict
began.
Reviving the Peace Process
Baker's most challenging effort came in the months after the war when he
attempted to restart the Middle East peace process, which had broken down
in mid-1990. It was a gamble, particularly given the many false starts in the
region since the Camp David accords that led to the 1978 Egyptian-Israeli peace
treaty, and many were surprised that such a risk would be taken by Baker, who
had earned the nickname
"Mr. Caution" when in the White House.
But Baker made the gamble pay off with perseverance, clever tactics and the
benefit of other international developments, including the collapse of Soviet
communism, the weakened position of Arab rejectionists and the enhancement of
U.S. prestige that followed the gulf war.
In particular, Baker pressured two of the Middle East's most cautious and
mutually antagonistic parties, Israel and Syria, to come to the table for the
first time. In one of his first meetings with Assad after the war, Baker
appealed to him by saying the incipient peace process would pose no
immediate risk to him.
"You can walk through that door any time you want," Baker said, according to an informed U.S. official. Assad stayed.
Likewise, Baker made the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, an offer he
could not refuse: direct talks with Israel's Arab neighbors, which Israel had
been seeking for four decades. And Baker impressed the Palestinians by his
willingness to discuss, at great length, their role in the peace process.
The result was that the United States became a powerful catalyst for the Madrid
peace conference, the beginning of a series of direct negotiations among the
Middle East parties. The talks have so far been inconclusive, but they resume
in Washington Aug. 24 with a new and presumably more flexible Israeli
government at the table.
Approach to Moscow
In dealing with the Soviet Union, Baker began
cautiously, spending much of his first year as secretary testing Gorbachev. But
as the Soviet leader's troubles deepened at home, Baker and then-foreign
minister Eduard Shevardnadze were able to strike numerous deals on arms
control. They also moved to end superpower rivalry in Central America, Africa
and Asia and, with the Europeans, fashioned an agreement for the unification of
Germany that kept Germany in the North Atlantic military alliance.
But Baker's error -- along with Bush's -- may have been to underestimate the
larger forces working against Gorbachev and tearing apart the Soviet Union.
Bush and Baker had worked so long with Gorbachev, endorsing his attempts at a
revolution from above, that they failed to heed the grass-roots revolution
boiling up from below. Until the abortive August 1991 coup, senior U.S.
officials had given little attention to Russian President Boris
Yeltsin, whose strong stand against the plotters proved critical in defeating
the coup.
Bush and Baker discovered
"a stronger democratic movement inside Russia than they had expected, and in a
way they were lucky that movement was in position to save their man Gorbachev,
but not for long," said Stephen Sestanovich of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
in Washington.
"They underestimated what that movement would be able to do."
Frederick Starr, president of Oberlin College and a Soviet specialist, said
Bush and Baker should be given
"full marks" for avoiding the many missteps they could have made in responding to the
crumbling Soviet empire.
"The moves they have made have been generally well considered and tending in the
right direction," he said.
But, Starr added,
"The price of this prudence has been a hypercaution. . . . They approached this
fundamentally as a shift being brought about from above . . . and undervalued
the extent to which this has been a kind of
oceanic movement from below."
Bush and Baker retreated from their international leadership roles late in 1991
after the surprise election victory of Sen. Harris Wofford (D-Pa.) signaled
that U.S. voters were turning inward. When Bush made his troubled visit to
Japan, Baker was not even at his side. When two influential Democrats, Rep. Les
Aspin (Wis.) and Sen. Sam Nunn (Ga.), won approval of a bill providing $ 500
million for the former Soviet republics, Baker and the administration were
silent for months about whether and how they would spend the money.
Baker convened an international conference on Russian aid earlier this year,
but many U.S. allies complained privately that the administration remained
captive to the inward-looking sentiment at home. A bipartisan effort to aid
Russia was mounted only after an
appeal from former president Richard M. Nixon.
As the crisis in Yugoslavia deepened, the administration did not return to the
aggressive internationalism of its early years. In a June 1991 visit to
Yugoslavia, Baker warned of the
"dangers of disintegration of this country" and declared the United States would not recognize the independence of the
separatist republics. But Baker then left the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia
to the European allies.
"Baker safely reflects the national mood," Starr said.
"American foreign policy must stand muster with the public, and Baker and Bush
were being extremely careful not to expose themselves to criticism down the
line.
"This country has turned in on itself to a profound degree," Starr said, and Bush and Baker have acceded to a
"domestic veto over their words and deeds."
GRAPHIC: PHOTO, SECRETARY OF STATE JAMES A. BAKER III TELLS STATE DEPARTMENT EMPLOYEES
OF HIS DEPARTURE. GERALD MARTINEAU
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
