Baker Looks Ahead

Secretary of State James A. Baker III has offered the most comprehensive and optimistic view of Soviet-American relations to come from the Bush Administration so far. To paraphrase, he peered into the Soviet future and decided it may work. He also declared that this country’s best interests lie in helping make it work, where help is feasible without interfering in Soviet affairs.

Skeptics about both the intentions and the chances for survival of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his reform movement will quarrel with much of what Baker said to the Foreign Policy Association in New York Monday. But as a whole, his view is balanced and reasonable, a sturdy foundation on which to build American policies for dealing with the Soviet Union.

“We now have an historic opportunity with the Soviet Union,” Baker said in one passage. “We have the chance to leave behind the ups and downs of the Cold War. We can move beyond containment to make the change toward better superpower relations more secure and less reversible.”

Baker’s speech was both an analysis of change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and a report on impressions formed since last summer, particularly during his long series of meetings with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. To the extent that it was intended also to rebut claims, chiefly from Democrats, that the Bush Administration is only vaguely aware of the scope and magnitude of the changes and too timid to do much about them, it was a success.

The analysis was not all sweetness and light. Baker criticized the Soviet Union for stalling on total withdrawal from regional trouble spots in which the superpowers are on opposing sides. Arms shipments to Afghanistan and Ethiopia are increasing, he said, and shipments to Cambodia have doubled during the past year. And while Gorbachev speaks of cutting the Soviet defense budget, he said, and of turning swords into plowshares, Washington still sees no concrete results.

Still, the Baker speech went farther than the Administration had gone before in linking Soviet domestic reforms with changes in its foreign policy that are “more advantageous to our interests.” One task of American foreign policy, he said, is to search out converging interests and do what it can to help domestic Soviet reforms along. “. . . We want perestroika, including the restructuring of Soviet-American relations, to succeed,” he said.

He said expanded trade will take time because it must be strictly cash-and-carry. Most-favored-nation status must wait, he said, until the Soviets codify their emigration policies.

But Baker said the United States could start at once to help the Soviets through the “uncharted waters” of market incentives, competition and pricing by helping them build a statistical base, create a consumer price index and advise them on other economic reforms, as requested. That may not sound momentous, but at a minimum it would spare Soviet visitors the embarrassment of having to base discussions of their economy on Central Intelligence Agency figures. It is an offer to help, and with the Cold War still so vivid a memory, the thought alone counts for something.