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Search Terms: James A. Baker, accomplishments OR foreign policy

Document 12 of 18.

August 3, 1992

SECTION: U. S. NEWS; Vol. 113, No. 5; Pg. 24

LENGTH: 1470 words

HEADLINE: Stop the world, we want to get off

BYLINE: By Robin Knight; Carla Anne Robbins; Jim Impoco; Linda Robinson; Richard Z. Chesnoff; Ross Dunn; Tim Zimmermann

DATELINE: Moscow; Tokyo; Mexico City; Johannesburg

HIGHLIGHT:
Secretary of State Baker's return to the White House may speed America's diplomatic decline;

BODY:
George C. Marshall, America's premier postwar diplomat, believed that soldiers and statesmen should remain above politics. In an effort to preserve his virtue and his independence, Marshall refused even to vote.

George Bush and his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, have no such qualms. At Bush's request, Baker is preparing to relinquish command of American diplomacy to take charge of the president's stumbling and disorganized re-election effort. With the cold war over, communism defeated and democracy and market economics ascendant, administration officials argue, putting diplomacy on hold for a few months is of little consequence -- especially when American voters are preoccupied with events at home.

But the world is unlikely to stop if Baker gets off, and sacrificing the administration's principal diplomatic asset -- Baker's highly personalized approach to global politics and vaunted deal making -- is likely to accelerate the decline of America's influence in Europe and Asia and rob the administration's few diplomatic initiatives of momentum at a critical time. ''Baker has been so much at the center of everything that no matter what the capabilities of those involved, the momentum is slowed," says Morton Abramowitz, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

New opportunity. Nowhere is this danger greater than in the Middle East, where an intransigent Saddam Hussein is posing a new challenge to America and the world (box, Page 26), but where elections in Israel also have given the administration a new opportunity to press its boldest diplomatic effort.

Making what may be his farewell tour of the region last week, Baker may have been reassured that it will be business as usual once he leaves the scene. ''The peace process is an American policy, not the policy of an individual," says Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi. Adds an aide to the new Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin: ''If the [U.S.] president wants this thing to move, it will continue to move. Most of the major players are ready for movement."

Such public optimism that the peace process now has momentum of its own is not necessarily echoed behind the scenes, however. Baker made up most of the ''rules" of the current round of peacemaking as he went along, changing them at will as strategy dictated. In a part of the world where personal ties are everything, he has built bridges to men as diverse as Syria's President Hafez Assad and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

To seize the new opportunity, the administration will need to maintain constant high-level pressure on all sides for months. Baker's likely successor at State, Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger, is a more experienced diplomat than Baker and perhaps an equally savvy political operator. But Eagleburger is likely to be named acting secretary to avoid a bruising confirmation battle, his health is not robust and he lacks the first-friend relationship with Bush that has given Baker more latitude and stature than any secretary of state since Henry Kissinger.

Some Israelis already are arguing that Israel should wait for the results of the U.S. election before committing itself further. On the Arab side, potential spoilers such as Syria's Assad and the Palestine Liberation Organization may be tempted to use any slowdown in the peace talks to grind diplomacy to a halt. ''Baker's departure sends a signal -- that Bush is in trouble," says a senior American official in Europe. ''Foreign governments are certain to recognize this."

On some fronts, however, Baker's departure may cause hardly a ripple. While Baker helped prod the Europeans to take action, the Bush administration has remained mostly a bystander as Yugoslavia has collapsed into civil war. Washington has struggled to avoid rows with France, Germany, Greece, Russia, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Community over how to deal with the crisis, as millions of refugees stream out of Bosnia and as Serbia flouts EC-brokered cease-fires and U.N.-imposed sanctions. More than any other issue, Yugoslavia's breakup has exposed the administration's ''new world order" as hollow rhetoric. Now pressures are growing either to get more involved (by widening the allied role in Bosnia) or to stand aside.

Little progress is likely before 1993 in the attempt to forge a new General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade treaty and head off growing protectionist pressures in the United States and elsewhere. The United States and Europe seem set on a collision course over farm subsidies. Japan's trade surplus with America is expected to top $ 50 billion this year. And the North American free-trade treaty with Canada and Mexico that Bush supports is facing second thoughts in Canada and resistance in Congress.

Inward-looking sentiment on Capitol Hill at a time of mounting ethnic strife in the republics of the former Soviet Union also is likely to stall the administration's request for aid to Russian reformers. In the past such an impasse, coupled with a change of command at State and growing political tension in Moscow, could have produced sparks with the Russians. No more. ''The relationship has stabilized," says a Russian Foreign Ministry official. ''In many ways, the personalities involved are less important now than they were during the cold war, when personal misunderstandings could become dangerous confrontations."

Back burners. In some places, Washington's preoccupation with politics will be welcome. In South Africa, where labor unrest is increasing and constitutional talks between the white regime of President F.W. de Klerk and the African National Congress and other black-led political parties are faltering, no United States-led mediation is likely -- or wanted -- this fall. To the probable relief of Haiti's military rulers, ebbing American pressure on them could cost the country's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, his last chance to negotiate a return and reinstate democracy. Haiti ''is not getting the top-level attention it needs," says Ernest Preeg of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies. ''It is a dangerous situation."

That Baker's expected move from the State Department to the White House will not send the world into a tailspin is itself testimony to the decline in American power and influence that has taken place since 1988. Some diminution of America's importance was inevitable as the Soviet Union collapsed, the value of U.S. military power in Europe and Asia ebbed and Japan and the European Community acquired new economic strength. The trend has not all been one way; the United States under George Bush has smoothed the way for German reunification, led a war coalition against Iraq and revived Mideast peace hopes. But more often than not a status quo-minded administration, hobbled by domestic economic problems, has found itself playing a kind of catch-up diplomacy that has offered no vision of a post-cold-war world.

Today a sense of drift pervades negotiations over trade and security ties with allies in Europe and Asia. Although Japan's economic boom and the end of the Soviet threat are gradually undermining America's postwar alliance with Japan, Baker has spent more time in Mongolia than in Japan. ''It's disgraceful," says Robert Orr, an Asia expert at Tokyo's Sophia University. ''The Bush administration has abandoned the region. If there's a hiatus, no one will notice."

As the perception grows that the American century is ending, America's allies are going their own ways, and organizations such as the U.N. are taking the lead in ending old quarrels and shaping the new world. France and Germany are setting their own security policies regardless of the damage done to U.S.-led NATO. The International Monetary Fund, not the United States, is presiding over Russia's economic transformation. It is the U.N. that is trying to bring democracy to Cambodia, Angola and South Africa.

In Baker, Bush has recruited the one man who may be able to rescue his campaign. But the move is a measure of Bush's desperation -- and a signal to an increasingly unstable world that if Washington is prepared to put politics first, everyone else is free to do likewise.

ISSUES THAT WON'T WAIT

In the post-cold-war era, American foreign policy faces an array of old and new global problems. Among them:

Iraq. Baghdad flouts the U.N. cease-fire. Military action is risky; doing nothing signals weakness.

Middle East. Prospects for peace have improved, but many players want steady, subtle American supervision.

Yugoslavia. Baker prodded Europe to try to stop the civil war, but now peace talks are stalled and the refugee tide is growing.GATT. Global trade talks are deadlocked amid growing protectionist sentiments.

GRAPHIC: Drawing, No caption (Illustration by Christopher Zacharow for USN&WR); Picture, Taking over? Eagleburger is a veteran diplomat (Chick Harrity -- USN&WR)

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Document 12 of 18.


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