Warm Greetings but Some Old Gripes : Baker’s Hectic NATO Trip Helps Set Up Personal Ties

If it’s Thursday, this must be Belgium. Or the Netherlands. Or maybe Luxembourg.

For the better part of a week, Secretary of State James A. Baker III has been dashing across Europe on a grueling schedule, visiting 14 countries at a pace of three or four a day. The idea, Baker explained, was to show the United States’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies that the Bush Administration cares about them--and to give the new secretary “a chance to establish a personal relationship” with his European counterparts.

The device of touching down in every NATO country--including tiny Iceland and Luxembourg--was pure Jim Baker, his aides noted. The secretary of state is the same student of political symbolism (and airborne campaigning) who helped Ronald Reagan and George Bush win three presidential elections.

Baker’s odyssey has found Western Europe, long taken for granted as the United States’ premier ally, to be up for grabs again; the Bush Administration will have to accord to the future of Europe as much attention as it may have been ready to pay the Soviet Union, the Middle East and Central America.

And it has provided a first glimpse of Baker as secretary of state: a canny politician-turned-diplomat who is likely to be as activist--and as secretive--as any since Henry A. Kissinger.

How well Baker’s opening gambit is working, however, is another question. Not surprisingly, the secretary’s aides say his maiden voyage has been a smashing success.

“Almost every single meeting . . . has started by an expression of appreciation for his doing this,” said a senior official who accompanied Baker. “They have all acknowledged that this kind of a trip is backbreaking. . . . They know it is unusual. They know it is hard.”

Indeed, most countries went beyond the requirements of protocol, setting up meetings for Baker with their prime ministers rather than just his counterparts at the foreign ministries. Two, Belgium and Luxembourg, even produced their heads of state.

In Britain, Baker was flown by helicopter to Chequers, the prime minister’s country house, for Sunday lunch with a Margaret Thatcher clearly anxious to continue the special relationship with Washington she enjoyed in Reagan’s day.

Officials in Iceland and Norway, rarely favored with visits by top U.S. officials, were clearly impressed by Baker’s two-hour stopovers.

“We think it’s an important start for a new Administration,” said Norway’s prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, beaming.

But in West Germany, where the Bush Administration has been pressuring the Bonn government on arms control issues, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher was polite but stone-faced when Baker flew in. And in Ankara, a Turkish official, asked whether Baker’s visit had made a big impression, shrugged dismissively.

‘Your secretaries of state all come about once a year,” he said.

Baker and his aides said they were delighted at the expressions of fidelity to the 16-nation Western Alliance that they heard at every stop.

“We heard an awful lot of expressions not only of good will, but of a strong commitment to new partnership, greater cooperation, greater solidarity, greater unity,” said a senior aide.

But behind the customary talk of unity, there were also polite disagreements. The West Germans and Italians pressed for NATO discussions of negotiations to reduce the number of short-range nuclear missiles in Europe, a subject that the Bush Administration would prefer to avoid. The British asked for an easing of curbs on high-technology exports to the Soviet Union. The Greeks restated their intention of closing U.S. bases on their soil. NATO, one American diplomat was quoted as saying, is beginning to sound like “a badly rehearsed orchestra.”

Underlying at least some of the cacophony is the belief of many Europeans that Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev is serious about eliminating the Soviet military threat to Western Europe. Since Gorbachev’s announcement in December that the Soviet Union will unilaterally withdraw six tank divisions from the Continent, public opinion, especially in West Germany, has increasingly questioned the need for more military spending.

“There’s an impression there that if the Cold War is over and there’s no threat, then why spend on defense?” a State Department official said. “It erodes the credibility of NATO.”

May Be More Pressing

If Baker learned anything on his wearying passage through 15 capitals, including Ottawa before Europe, it may be that the very basis of NATO’s existence can no longer be taken for granted--and that the issue may be more pressing than he realized.

“You can read all the (State Department) papers . . . but when you go into a room with people who have these problems on a daily basis, it’s much more immediate,” the official said.

Several veteran diplomats gave Baker high marks for swiftly and deftly cementing bilateral relationships with each of the 15 allies.

“He’s a political animal, and these foreign ministers are all politicians,” commented one aide. “He understands their needs.”

Baker has long been known for preparing almost obsessively for important meetings, and aides said he devoured thick briefing books before every stop on his trip. Whatever the method, he discoursed fluently on local concerns in 15 capitals, from Aegean Sea armaments (in Turkey) to ground-water pollution around NATO air bases (in Iceland).

He also turned on his Texas lawyer’s charm at every stop, lauding his hosts or their devotion to the alliance and recalling, in a down-home way, his previous visits to their country--as a Reagan aide, as a tourist or even, in Greece, as a U.S. Marine on shore leave in 1953.

The trip, Baker’s first as secretary of state, was something of a shakedown cruise. Baker and his closest aides, including several from the tightly knit group who have worked for him since he was White House chief of staff in the first Reagan Administration, are still getting used to the State Department and its slightly foreign ways.

“You wouldn’t believe the number of cables that they send to us,” said one awe-struck aide. “We get through our meetings at midnight, we read until 2 in the morning and then we’re up again at 6.”

While some of his aides looked noticeably rumpled and red-eyed as the week of six-meeting days wore on, Baker managed somehow to look crisp and fresh at every stop, even though he has said that he dreads such long trips because of the jet lag.

“He’s doing better than he usually does,” said his wife, Susan, who also came on the trip--but skipped a few of the more arduous days.

So rapid-fire was Baker’s schedule that some of his one-on-one meetings lasted only 20 minutes--a pace which did not prevent him, in Lisbon, from extolling what he called an “extended discussion” with Portugal’s foreign minister.

Baker’s famous self-discipline was evident, too. Walking out of royal palaces, ancient parliaments and modern office buildings in city after city, he responded to reporters’ questions with a tight smile and a stock response: “We discussed a wide range of East-West issues.”

Halfway through the journey, criticism in Washington over Baker’s holding millions of dollars worth of stock in Chemical New York Corp.--a banking company with billions in Third World loans--prompted the secretary of state to announce that he would sell all publicly held stocks in his portfolio.

Aides said it was a painful decision--the Chemical stock derived from holdings in a bank that Baker’s grandfather founded, and its sale was expected to cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. But Baker betrayed no concern over the issue before he made his decision, and said nothing about it afterward.

The secretary of state’s aides did, however, give away one small sign of frailty in their otherwise ascetic chief.

Each evening, they said, he took a single vodka martini.