Diplomacy Boldness Without Vision

By Richard Lacayo

The atmosphere in a congressional hearing room doesn't get much testier than this. Secretary of State James Baker III appeared on Capitol Hill last week to announce the Administration's terms for the $10 billion in loan guarantees that Israel is seeking to help resettle Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Taking a gamble no previous Administration has been willing to contemplate seriously, Baker laid out a blunt policy line to the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations. Israel has two choices, he said. The U.S. would back the loans for five years with no strings attached -- but only if Israel agreed to freeze its rapid construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Or Israel could complete those settlements in progress, in which case the U.S. would cut its guarantee by the same amount spent on them.

Those are demands that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has already said he could never accept. At the hearing, Florida Democrat Larry Smith wanted to know why the Secretary was placing conditions on the Israelis but not on the Arab side. When Baker gave a brief answer and then refused to elaborate, Smith's frustrations erupted. "I hope someday," he said, "the American public is going to determine whether you've finished the answers or not. It's disgraceful!"

But Baker knew what he was doing. The man who laid down his terms to Congress last week is the same dogged tactician who forged the framework for the Arab-Israeli peace process last year during eight painstaking shuttles around the Middle East. As a seasoned political strategist, a former campaign adviser for Reagan and manager for Bush, he seems to have calculated that antipathy to foreign aid is a more powerful election-year force than the usual voter support for Israel. He also seems to be betting that if Israel does not come around on the settlements before its parliamentary elections in June, Shamir will be bounced by voters for alienating Washington with his intransigence.

If Baker's latest ploy succeeds, it could be one more significant step toward an Arab-Israeli peace -- a prospect that has moved from the unthinkable to the merely improbable as a result of his shrewd and tireless prodding of both sides. The Secretary has repeatedly demonstrated a flair for problem solving, not only by launching the Middle East talks but also by working out an agreement with Congress on Nicaragua in 1989 and by helping stitch together last year's coalition against Saddam Hussein. Baker may not fashion foreign policy single-handedly -- certainly not in an Administration where the President is a seasoned internationalist who also consults closely with National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. But Baker is the man who, more than any other, gets White House policy to work.

Yet he has also become a symbol of the Administration's blind spots. Chief among them is failure to formulate a vision for America's future course in the wake of the cold war. The fundamental principle of American foreign policy since 1945 -- the containment of communism -- makes no sense today. The chief task now is to meet new challenges, like the tough economic competition from Europe and East Asia and the combustible nationalism of a host of small nations. In such a world, none of the past approaches to American policy -- from Woodrow Wilson's global do-goodism to Henry Kissinger's balance-of-power realpolitik -- can be counted on to provide the answers.

And neither, it seems, can Baker. Critics claim that like Bush, Baker is drawn too heavily toward stability. Baker backed the President's impulse to go on supporting Gorbachev even when the ex-Soviet leader's weaknesses were becoming clear. Likewise, the Secretary's attachment to the familiar map of Europe caused him to misread the depth of nationalist feeling among the ethnic enclaves of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.

"The Administration has done well at responding competently to events as they've occurred, but they haven't developed a strategy for the post-cold war world," says Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East. "Our foreign policy has been too crisis oriented."

In the absence of clearly defined policy goals, even the successful projection of American military power can come to an indecisive conclusion. Two years after the American invasion of Panama, that nation is once again a corrupt parody of democracy. One year after the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein remains in power, still repressing his own people and threatening the hapless Kurds, while the autocratic Kuwaitis pursue their own abuses against Palestinians in their country.

Baker has also been criticized for his management of the State Department. He has alienated senior career diplomats by relying too heavily on a tight circle of longtime aides brought in from the outside. Among them: policy planning director Dennis Ross; counsellor and Under Secretary for Economic and Agricultural Affairs Robert Zoellick; and Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Margaret Tutwiler. Career types especially resent Baker's decision to replace Thomas Pickering as the U.S. representative to the United Nations. A seasoned and effective diplomat, Pickering held the Security Council in line through 12 anti-Iraq resolutions during the six months leading up to the gulf war. At the height of the gulf crisis last year, someone from the State Department -- presumably under instruction from higher up -- called the U.S. mission at the U.N. demanding to know why Pickering's picture had been on the front page of the New York Times for two days in a row.

Critics say Baker has missed signals that he might have caught if he were less insulated by his tiny team from the Foreign Service and outside experts. He consistently underestimated the power of nationalism in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Preoccupied with Gorbachev and German unification, he did not smell the trouble brewing in Baghdad as Saddam Hussein moved closer to invading Kuwait.

Once the crisis erupted, Baker reacted quickly and efficiently. His skills as negotiator and tactician proved essential in putting together the anti- Saddam alliance. But when Kuwait was liberated, the Administration's feeble political planning for the war's aftermath was laid bare. Concerned that a weakened Iraq might leave a vacuum for Iranian power to fill and prompt Turkish Kurds to join their Iraqi compatriots in a breakaway country, Washington stood back while Saddam turned his guns against Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites. Comments an Administration official: "When Bush and Baker confront the breakup of a nation-state, whether it's Iraq, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, they instinctively reach for an older, more traditional kind of world."

The same preference for stability has shaped the Administration's policy on China. The White House has consistently fought attempts by Congress to punish Beijing for its suppression of human rights. Bush is almost certain to veto a measure approved by the Senate last week. It would impose stringent conditions on the annual renewal of China's most-favored-nation trading status in July, requiring China to release all political prisoners, effectively open its markets to U.S. goods and take "clear and unequivocal" steps to curb sales of arms and nuclear technology abroad. Baker also rejects this ultimatum.

Though Baker gets credit in European capitals for pushing early for German unification, he is criticized by some Europeans for insisting that NATO remain the main vehicle for the exercise of American influence on the Continent. There is also concern that the U.S. is too inattentive to the volatile situations in central and southeastern Europe and unresponsive to the huge problems of the former Soviet Union. It was mid-December by the time Baker got around to calling for an international conference to help the new republics through the winter. Last month he dashed through half a dozen former Soviet republics without making any concrete promise of further assistance to stabilize their economies. "The Bush Administration is acting as if any participation in this great transformation is radioactive," says Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

"We're suffering enormously from the lack of an integrated approach that makes foreign economic policy a primary task of the post-cold war effort," says Peter Tarnoff, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Baker's a natural to play that role, and if he's not doing it, it's not being done."

Perhaps history will rate Baker as the right man for the end of the cold war, a deft and prudent player of the good cards dealt him by the collapse of communism. But in a fragmented and challenging new world, American foreign policy needs a conceptual overhaul, the kind of coherent vision that it got in a simpler past from such men as Dean Acheson and George Kennan. A seat-of-the- pants approach to international relations, even one with its share of ! short-term successes, will not preserve American leadership.

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington, with other bureaus