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

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August 1, 1992

SECTION: FOCUSES; Foreign Policy; Vol. 24, No. 31; Pg. 1808

LENGTH: 1035 words

HEADLINE: JIM BAKER'S LEGACY

BYLINE: CHRISTOPHER MADISON

BODY:
By the time he completed his most recent peacemaking journey to the Middle East in late July -- with a stopover in Asia before heading home -- Secretary of State James A. Baker III had logged more than 600,000 miles in a three-and-a-half-year search for international consensus and cooperation. There have been successes on his odyssey: and end to war in Central America, arms control agreements with Russia, relations with Europe put on an even keel and even some inching forward toward peace in the Middle East.

But as Baker readies his departure from Foggy Bottom to attempt a dramatic rescue of President Bush's faltering political campaign, some, particularly Democrats in Congress, believe that the Secretary is leaving precipitately: Baker came to the job at a time of unprecedented uncertainty in the world, but leaves with Bush's New World Order still far from a reality. We don't know how much more he could have accomplished.

"The nation will pay a large price" if Baker leaves now, Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes, D-Md., a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a late-July floor speech. "The nation's interests, in terms of losing the continuity, the knowledge, the experience, the skill that Secretary Baker has brought, will be harmed in order to serve the President's political interests."

An obvious cost will come in the Mideast. Baker's premature departure, according to Martin Indyk of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, will sap some momentum from the just-restarted peace talks.

But Baker himself must be weary. From the start of the Bush presidency, Baker has tackled the foreign policy agenda at a frantic pace. First, he dispatched his aides to Capitol Hill to make peace with the Democrats on Central America. Then, German unification suddenly appeared on the screen, and Baker deftly put the United States in the game while other European allies stayed behind. (The current health of U.S-German relations, despite several irritants, dates back to the goodwill generated by Baker and Bush in 1989 and 1990.)

The Soviet Union, already on the decline when Bush took possession of the White House, was another obvious task for a diplomatic Hercules, and Baker put it at the top of his list: He quickly bonded with Eduard A. Shevardnadze, Mikhail S. Gorbachev's foreign minister, and their relationship proved enormously helpful when Bush needed Soviet acquiescence in the U.N. coalition that waged war on Iraq in 1991.

Shevardnadze resigned in 1991 to protest the hard-line drift of Gorbachev's policies, and his departure produced a rare moment of public emotion from Baker: He seemed genuinely moved, and for a moment put aside his stoic mask.

In the Middle East, Baker proved bolder after the Persian Gulf war than before (when he had little luck with peacemaking). He has brought Arabs and Israelis to the peace table and kept them there. The highlight of Baker's diplomacy may have been his confrontational tactics with Israel, in which the Administration withheld U.S. loan guarantees until Israel changed its policies on settlements in the occupied territories -- and changed its government.

But some analysts have found Baker's glass half-empty, not half-full. Like his best friend, the President, Baker is not one to articulate a vision or a strategy, and yet the end of the Cold War most surely seems to demand one. The closest he came, perhaps, was in a speech at his alma mater, Princeton University, last December. Looking back on the first 40 years of the postwar era, he said: Our policy was never solely about preventing a hot war or defeating Stalinism in a Cold War. What every President and every Congress have sought is a different world free from the shadows of war, of political tyranny, of economic distress. These were, and these are, our ideals."

Baker's more convincing persona is not that of the philosopher but the pragmatic problem solver, the lawyer-politician whose skill lies in his ability to keep his focus on the objective at hand and to pursue it tenaciously and without sentimentality.

But sometimes a lack of vision proves tragic or fatal when combined with too much tenacity. The Administration's failure to foresee Iraq's invasion of Kuwait is attributed in part to Baker's preoccupation with U.S.-Soviet relations and German unification at the expense of other crises. Baker's style was also at fault. He surrounded himself with an inner circle of loyal advisers and largely ignored State's career diplomats. Perhaps fulfilling the Secretary's low opinion of them, the foreign service officers failed to foresee the Iraq fiasco.

There were other cases of faulty vision. Baker was so focused on a unified Yugoslavia that he (and his advisers) did not realize until too late that the goal was impossible to achieve. Like Bush and White House national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, Baker missed the signs of Gorbachev's decline, was slow to see the inevitability of the breakup of the empire and slower still to embrace Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin.

Instead, Baker early on embraced the "center," the amorphous Commonwealth of Independent States that replaced the Soviet Union. That is now largely a forgotten entity.

Baker, of course, is not solely responsible for policy toward Russia and the other republics. In fact, Bush himself has taken most of the heat. "Both multilaterally and unilaterally," argued Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., in a recent Senate speech, "the Administration has presented a portrait of listlessness, invoking prudence as a mask for lethargy and bureaucratic gridlock." Similarly, Bush, not Baker, must be saddled with responsibility for U.S. policy toward China, which so far has secured few if any positive results.

Baker's legacy nonetheless will be inexorably tied to Bush's: How well did the Administration respond to the turmoil and the opportunities of the end of the Cold War? Baker seems forced by political circumstances to leave the arena before we can even glimpse the outcome. For a man accustomed to more control over his own destiny, it is a condition he undoubtedly finds irritating, if not maddening.

GRAPHIC: Picture, no caption, Richard A. Bloom

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

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