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                                                                                NATION, Page 24

DIPLOMACY

Boldness Without Vision


James Baker confronts the Israelis with unprecedented force,
but his critics say he and his boss have no larger framework
for America's foreign policy

By RICHARD LACAYO -- Reported by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington,
with other bureaus


    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.