Likes to Solve One Issue at a Time : Bush Won’t Follow Grand Design for Foreign Policy

Ask George Bush’s aides what the vice president has done in foreign policy, and they proudly recite a record of successful diplomatic missions: selling the NATO allies on medium-range missiles, mediating between Algeria and Morocco, patching up U.S. relations with India and more.

Ask about the President-elect’s overarching theme for foreign policy after he moves into the White House, however, and the answer is that he has none.

Unlike Richard M. Nixon, Bush will bring no grand design to the Oval Office. Unlike Ronald Reagan, he will bring no consuming passion “to begin the world again.” Instead, his aides and associates say, the President-elect is a practiced problem-solver, a man who takes on issues one at a time.

“He knows a great deal about foreign policy. He has a lot of ideas,” said Brent Scowcroft, a key Bush adviser who was President Gerald R. Ford’s national security assistant. “But they don’t naturally fall into an overall philosophy. Unlike Nixon, he does not come in with a fully laid-out agenda. He is more pragmatic. He has always appeared issue-oriented rather than conceptualization-oriented.”

Thus, rather than a dispatch case full of new ideas, the new President has only a modest list of planned initiatives--new efforts to negotiate reductions in chemical weapons and in the conventional military balance in Europe, perhaps a new diplomatic pass at the Nicaragua problem, but not much more.

Bush’s choice of James A. Baker III as secretary of state reinforces this practical approach. Like the President-elect, Baker is a pragmatic conservative who was often criticized by more ideological Reaganites for his willingness to compromise on key issues.

“Jim Baker is a superb tactician and a great executor, but he’s not big on the grand design either,” a former Baker aide said. “Grand designs look good on paper, but they can produce gridlock in practice.”

Likely Dominant Figure

Baker brings distinct strengths to his new job: Long Bush’s closest adviser and a formidable political operator, he is likely to dominate the new Administration’s foreign policy process more than any secretary of state since Henry A. Kissinger.

And Bush himself, whatever his limitations as a global thinker, will enter office with more knowledge and experience in international affairs than any President since Nixon.

The basic themes of the Bush-Baker foreign policy are clear: continued commitments to modernizing the U.S. military arsenal; to support a posture of “peace through strength”; polite skepticism about the international intentions of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, and a new willingness to seek negotiated solutions to conflicts in such Third World arenas as Central America and southern Africa.

But the new team, like most administrations, may well find its priorities dictated by the press of events. For instance:

--In U.S.-Soviet relations, negotiators at the strategic arms reduction talks--the so-called START talks--are waiting for instructions from the new President.

--In Central America, Nicaragua’s Contra rebels, the centerpiece of Reagan Administration strategy, are slowly collapsing, and Bush aides say they are already working on a new, and inevitably controversial, plan to resuscitate the policy.

--In the Middle East, a new government in Israel and talk of new moderation in the Palestine Liberation Organization could lead to new pressure for a U.S. negotiating initiative.

Bush’s first major foreign policy decisions will come well before Inauguration Day: dozens of appointments to senior positions in the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, the National Security Council staff and the CIA.

In a replay of the long-running battles over jobs that plagued the Reagan Administration, conservative organizations are already campaigning privately on behalf of some candidates and against others. Conservatives are promoting the hard-line U.S. ambassador to Honduras, Everett E. Briggs, to succeed Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for Latin America.

Baker may cede a few positions to the ideologues, but he is expected to make sure that no key jobs go to anyone who could seriously impede his control of foreign policy either at the State Department or the National Security Council, which is supposed to mediate foreign policy disputes between the State and Defense departments.

“He’ll make sure there’s nobody at the NSC who’s at variance with his viewpoint,” said the former Baker aide.

U.S.-SOVIET RELATIONS. As director of the CIA in 1976, Bush responded to complaints from conservatives that the agency was underestimating Soviet defense expenditures by ordering competing examinations of the issue by experts both inside and outside the CIA. The conservatives turned out to be right: The Kremlin was spending more on its military effort than the official U.S. estimates had shown.

The result probably contributed to Bush’s suspicion of the Soviet Union as a more dangerous adversary than it may sometimes appear. Today, when Gorbachev seeks to drive the Communist superpower toward political and economic reforms, Bush remains skeptical.

“We welcome the developments in the Soviet Union, but we should not let our hopes outrun our practical experience,” he said during the campaign. “Soviet ideology has proven bankrupt, but Russia remains a formidable military power.” Gorbachev has promised more democracy, he said, “but in the final analysis, the Soviet Union will be judged by what it delivers.”

Scowcroft, to whom Bush has turned for advice on the issue, says the United States knows too little about Kremlin politics to help Gorbachev succeed. He warns that it is also not clear that reforms inside the Soviet Union mean a lesser challenge to the United States in international affairs.

“It is no more of a good idea to subsidize the Soviet economy now than it was three years ago,” Scowcroft said. “We should focus on our own interests rather than playing in the internal politics of the Soviet Union.”

Another Bush adviser, Dennis Ross, said the President-elect believes Soviet politicians make hard decisions only when forced to “bite the bullet” by pressure from the West. Moscow signed a treaty banning medium-range missiles only after the United States deployed similar missiles in Western Europe, he said, and it began withdrawing from Afghanistan only after U.S.-backed rebels took the upper hand on the battlefield.

Bush will seek similar kinds of “leverage,” Ross said, so that he can negotiate from strength to encourage Gorbachev toward more accommodation with the United States, both in arms control and in Third World conflicts.

Bush has also taken a special interest in Eastern Europe, where the Soviet Union has been challenged by increased political ferment.

‘Interesting Arena’

“Eastern Europe is going to be as interesting an arena as anything else in international affairs,” he told The Times just before the election. Bush said he planned “to build on our policy of differentiation,” offering each country its own relationship with the United States.

Bush noted, however, that this approach to Eastern Europe would be crafted to avoid directly challenging the security interests of the Soviet Union. “You don’t go belligerent on him (Gorbachev) and risk making things worse,” he said.

At the same time, Bush has indicated that he wants to continue the pattern, set during the last three years of the Reagan Administration, of more frequent U.S.-Soviet meetings. In his press conference last week, the President-elect called for an early meeting between Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze to “make it clear to the Soviets that I would be willing to meet with Mr. Gorbachev.”

ARMS CONTROL. Bush will seek to complete a START treaty that would cut long-range nuclear weapons by a nominal 50% and require the most intrusive verification measures ever accepted by armed adversaries.

To get Gorbachev’s signature, he will have to compromise on some key issues: the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”), sea-launched cruise missiles and the amount of on-site inspections of suspected violations. But he cannot go too far without angering conservative Republicans, whose support he would need for ratification of a START treaty in the Senate.

Bush has also said he wants to give new urgency to negotiations on reducing conventional forces in Europe, on banning chemical and biological weapons and on restraining the proliferation of non-nuclear ballistic missiles.

“I think it would be easier to get a good START agreement if conventional force talks are accelerated,” Bush told The Times. “Chemical is a little different,” he added, because those negotiations would include dozens of countries and take on the difficult goal of banning weapons that are very easy to make.

Talks on reducing conventional forces in Europe are already scheduled between the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances.

“He is interested in conventional arms control on the theory that the natural step after INF (last year’s agreement to ban medium-range nuclear weapons) is to try to rectify the conventional imbalance,” Scowcroft said. The Warsaw Pact has many more troops and tanks in Europe than NATO; the conventional talks seek to bring the force strength down on both sides.

The first priority, Scowcroft said, is to hold serious talks with the NATO allies. “The alliance needs work on whatever strategy adjustments it needs to make following the INF treaty and to get priorities and proposals straight on conventional weapons,” he said. “ . . . One of the requirements is to get our act together with the Europeans before Gorbachev hits them with something to change” European public opinion.

CENTRAL AMERICA. Bush’s advisers are already working on proposals for a U.S. initiative in Central America, with two aims: reinvigorating U.S. influence in the region and improving the chances of winning congressional approval for aid to the Nicaraguan rebels.

“Part of the Reagan Administration’s problem on Nicaragua has been that Congress never believed we were serious about negotiations--because we often weren’t,” noted an official who has been asked to help prepare a new plan for the Bush Administration. “George Bush and Jim Baker won’t have that problem.”

Bush has made it clear that he does not plan to abandon President Reagan’s basic goals in Central America. “I will press to keep the pressure on the Sandinistas to keep their commitment . . . to democracy and freedom,” he said last week.

Sees Need for Leverage

“He thinks it is clear that the Sandinistas will not move without leverage being applied to them,” Scowcroft said. “Aid to the Contras isn’t the only way to apply leverage, but it is the one at hand; it is the one we have used.”

But in the first few months of the Bush Administration, the leverage may take a new form, officials said. Baker may launch a U.S. negotiating initiative, coordinated with several Latin American governments, “to call the Sandinistas’ bluff,” one aide said.

The initiative would probably include direct talks between the United States and the Sandinistas, something the Reagan Administration has rejected for the past four years. The idea would be to get talks under way, to convince Congress that the Administration was serious about negotiations--and then to ask for renewed military aid for the Contras.

The Bush Administration faces another long-running headache in Panama, where Gen. Manuel A. Noriega has clung doggedly to power despite U.S. attempts to force him out.

Some experts on the area have speculated that Bush may ask Reagan to resolve the issue before Inauguration Day--either by making a deal with Noriega or by attempting to engineer a coup against him. There has been no sign yet of any such move.

MIDDLE EAST. With a new government taking shape in Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization apparently moving toward tacit recognition of Israel’s right to exist, Bush has an opportunity to take bold action that could have a major impact on the flagging Middle East peace process. But there is no guarantee of success, and sources close to Bush say the new President will probably move cautiously.

“Early movement in the Middle East is extremely unlikely,” said Scowcroft.

A Reagan Administration Middle East specialist suggested that Bush would take the initiative only in the unlikely event that his hand was forced by events beyond his control.

“He will act only if things get so terrible that we have to act--and they won’t--or if things get so favorable that we will want to act--and they probably will not,” the official said.

Bush will take office with a relatively blank slate concerning the Middle East. He avoided making campaign promises that would restrict his options. And both Israel and the Palestinians are in a better position to act than they have been for years--if they should choose to do so.

Staff writer Robert C. Toth also contributed to this story.