Call It Luck, Skill or Both: Baker Rides a Win Streak

A few weeks ago, as Secretary of State James A. Baker III was regaling a rapt breakfast table of congressmen with tales from his latest visit to Moscow, a pair of Democrats broke in to complain about the Administration’s foreign aid programs.

If the Cold War was over, they asked, why hadn’t the budget changed? Why wasn’t there more money for the new democracies in Eastern Europe and poor countries in Latin America and Africa?

Baker’s hazel eyes narrowed. His honeyed voice went cold.

“You want to go out and argue for higher taxes to pay for foreign aid?” he demanded, according to officials who were present. “Try that argument out in your district, congressman.”

The response was pure Jim Baker: politically canny, with a well-honed sense of the bounds of domestic consensus--but, his critics would say, too hesitant to go beyond the near-term possible.

In little more than a year in the job, Baker has made himself the most powerful secretary of state since Henry A. Kissinger--and the closest the Bush Administration has to a foreign policy architect.

Baker has won widespread credit for moving the Administration from its initial standoffish view of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to its current, more active effort to cooperate with Moscow. He has cemented closer relations with West Germany and other European allies, and he has guided U.S. policy in Central America from war toward diplomacy.

His stock in Congress is high--sometimes breathtakingly so. One enthusiast, Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), declared at a recent hearing: “Every statesman in the world over the last four decades, from Churchill to Reagan, has attempted--with millions of troops and trillions of dollars--to free up Eastern Europe. . . . all to no avail, until the first year of the Baker Administration at State.”

“He’s a deal maker, a negotiator, a master broker,” said Roger Stone, a Republican political consultant who worked with Baker on George Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. “He’s perfect for the job.”

Even Baker’s critics acknowledge his prowess as a deal maker. But what the Bush Administration needs most, they argue, is not a broker but a strategist.

“Lots of things have come up aces, but that’s more luck than anything else,” said Paul H. Nitze, the Ronald Reagan Administration’s chief arms negotiator and a foreign policy mandarin since 1944. “I don’t see any signs of subtlety or great planning.”

“We have a foreign policy shaped like a doughnut: there’s no center to it,” complained Michael Mandelbaum of the Council on Foreign Relations. “What is America’s role in the world? What’s our purpose? Baker hasn’t defined it. None of them has.”

At the turn of the year, Baker and his closest aides met in his elegant mahogany-paneled office to review their first year’s performance. They pronounced themselves satisfied.

“The U.S.-Soviet relationship has progressed well in a number of areas,” one of Baker’s top advisers said, paraphrasing the internal review. “In arms control, we’ve made a major move forward” in talks to limit conventional armed forces in Europe. “In Western Europe, we’ve been ahead of the curve, especially on the German question.”

In Eastern Europe, he said, “events have been extremely positive. We’ve tried to set out some principles in terms of democracy and free market economies. But it’s a tough issue on which to satisfy the public’s yearning for a conceptual framework.”

He bristled--as does Baker--at the suggestion that they have failed to chart a strategy.

“Give me a break,” the aide said. “We have set out a strategy, in a series of speeches the President has given and the secretary has given. It’s there, but some people want to pretend it isn’t--often for political reasons.”

Undeniably, Bush and Baker have spelled out a series of basic principles to guide U.S. diplomacy: support for reform in the Soviet Union, support for democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, cooperation with allies to promote stability.

But they have advanced only modest specifics to back up those principles. There is no new Marshall Plan, reflecting the President’s insistence that U.S. funds are short, and no detailed new structure for European security, reflecting his apparent reluctance to get too far in front of events.

Nevertheless, Baker and his aides take considerable pride in having brought the Administration around to a new, more cooperative attitude toward the Kremlin.

At the outset of his Administration, Bush deliberately suspended the warming of U.S.-Soviet relations that had occurred under Reagan. For six months, Administration officials debated whether Gorbachev’s reforms were likely to last and how the United States should respond.

White House National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney counseled caution. But Baker warned that the Administration was being caught in a political squeeze: Gorbachev, with his penchant for headline-grabbing concessions, was becoming more popular than Bush in both Europe and the United States.

Over several months, aides said, Baker prodded Bush to take another look. “If we don’t move,” one official quoted Baker as saying, “we’re going to be hung out to dry.”

Bush agreed. Last summer, the President set in motion the first steps toward a meeting with Gorbachev. And last fall, Baker set out the rationale for a new approach, ending the Administration’s long debate. “Any uncertainty about the fate of reform in the Soviet Union . . . is all the more reason, not less, for us to seize the present opportunity,” he said.

“There was some (opposition) to begin with,” a senior official recalled. “But as communism began to crumble in Eastern Europe and it began to be apparent that they really weren’t going to use force, the people who really were interested in continuing the Cold War syndrome . . . came around. We’ve said we ought to help Gorbachev, and that’s fairly unanimous. At least, it’s unanimous now, because the President has made it very clear that that’s his policy.”

The episode, the most important shift in the Administration’s policy so far, confirmed Baker’s status as Bush’s most powerful adviser on foreign affairs. It also demonstrated that Bush himself, not Baker or anyone else, is in direct charge of foreign policy.

Before Bush’s inauguration, Baker was briefly touted as a “deputy President,” a hands-on manager who would run the entire Administration. That was never to be; even in foreign policy, where Baker is chief negotiator and chief tactician, Bush is clearly chief executive.

“Bush has established himself as a hands-on President, high in the polls, with a high profile,” said Helmut Sonnenfeldt, a former Kissinger aide now at Washington’s Brookings Institution. “Baker sometimes goes for days without being in the news; he isn’t a high-profile secretary of state. He picks the issues in which he’s interested--some say those he finds politically rewarding.”

Baker’s prodigious political instincts are a recurring theme among those who have watched him through the years--as both his greatest asset and, according to some, a serious potential weakness when it comes to diplomacy.

The secretary of state has successfully extended his back-room negotiating skills to the international arena and has carefully cultivated close working friendships with his two most important counterparts, the Soviet Union’s Eduard A. Shevardnadze and West Germany’s Hans Dietrich Genscher.

But he tends to address questions of substance from a purely political standpoint. Last year, when Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) criticized the Administration for “timidity” in its approach to Eastern Europe, Baker issued an unusual reply.

“When the President of the United States is rocking along with a 70% approval rating on his handling of foreign policy, if I were the leader of the opposition party, I might have something similar to say,” he declared.

Baker’s colleagues from the Reagan White House recall that, in those bygone days, he had little apparent enthusiasm for the details of foreign policy.

“Our four-item agenda with the Soviet Union was not something Jim originated or took much of an interest in,” recalled Robert C. McFarlane, Reagan’s national security adviser in 1983-1985.

“But Jim has a very valuable quality in setting political priorities,” McFarlane said. “He knows two rules: You should never espouse something you can’t get public support for, (and) you shouldn’t take on a policy--Arab-Israeli peace, arms control, anything--unless you have the State and Defense departments together, unless you can underwrite diplomacy with military strength.”

Since then, Baker has soaked up considerable on-the-job training in the arcana of foreign policy. But he still puts enormous stress on marshaling broad support for policies, both within the Cabinet and in the Congress.

One result, officials said, has been the most harmonious Administration in recent memory, one free of the bitter internecine struggles that marked the Reagan years.

“I can assure you it’s a hell of a lot better than I’ve ever seen it,” said Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, who has held high-level posts under five presidents.

But there is still plenty of friction, especially between the two institutions that traditionally vie for primacy in making foreign policy, the State Department and the National Security Council staff.

Some Baker aides privately deride Scowcroft’s staff at the NSC. “There are some good people over there,” allowed one, “but they’re the exception, not the rule.”

A favorite target is Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert M. Gates, the Administration’s leading pessimist on Soviet affairs--and the loser in the struggle over the direction of U.S. policy toward Moscow.

NSC staffers, in turn, occasionally express resentment of Baker’s power and his well-burnished public image. “You want to know how Jim Baker makes decisions?” one aide asked bitterly. “Here’s how.” He moistened a fingertip and held it up to the wind.

In particular, some White House aides charge that Baker makes himself scarce whenever Bush runs into political trouble on a foreign policy issue. When members of both parties in Congress protested Bush’s decision to renew high-level talks with China, for example, reporters at the State Department were told that Baker had warned against the idea. In public, however, Baker loyally defended Bush’s decision.

Baker and his staff deny that they were trying to play both sides of the issue. Still, some Bush aides are convinced that the State Department is not always on their side.

Another lightning rod for criticism is Baker’s small, close-knit staff. More than any secretary of state since Kissinger, he has held the reins of policy tightly in the suite of offices the State Department calls “the seventh floor,” and staffed it with a cadre of aides loyal only to him.

Closest to Baker are Margaret D. Tutwiler, 39, his canny and fiercely protective press secretary; Robert B. Zoellick, 36, his closest adviser on day-to-day operations, and Dennis B. Ross, 41, a cerebral former UC Berkeley scholar who acts as grand strategist.

At the second rung of influence are deputy secretary Eagleburger, 59; Robert M. Kimmitt, 42, undersecretary of state for political affairs, and Janet G. Mullins, 40, Baker’s chief liaison to Congress. With the exception of Eagleburger, none of the six has served as a foreign service officer.

State Department veterans complain that Baker’s reliance on his relatively inexperienced inner circle has cut him off from some of the advice he might be getting from the career bureaucracy.

“Things are so closely held on the seventh floor that it doesn’t inspire those of us in the trenches to take risks,” a middle-rank diplomat complained. “It doesn’t inspire us to do much of anything.”

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), who gives Baker mostly high marks, echoed this concern. “There does seem to be a feeling that things are very thinly staffed,” Lugar said. “It leads to demands by even junior members of the Senate to see the secretary or, at a minimum, Larry Eagleburger.”

Sonnenfeldt added: “It may be a mistake to try to keep things so closely held. The European issue and the Soviet issue are so ramified that you can’t really run them with three people. We discovered that in the Kissinger period.”

Baker’s aides, on the other hand, insist that the secretary dips into the bowels of the department when he needs to, but that he simply doesn’t cede as much policy-making leeway as the middle ranks would like.

Despite the generally laudatory reviews, critics have pounced on some of Baker’s actions. Not all of them are willing to speak openly.

“Baker has a long memory, and he works in mysterious ways,” said one former aide who refused to be quoted by name. “You may never know when he deals you the dying hand. He probably read Machiavelli in his crib.”

Even some of his own aides say Baker blundered last December when he said the United States would support Soviet military intervention in Romania to ensure the victory of the democratic revolution there.

“I think that was asinine,” sputtered Nitze. “And supporting Gorbachev against the Lithuanians (as the Administration did until last week) has been a mistake as well.”

In arms control, Nitze charged that Baker and Bush erred by setting a deadline of June for the conclusion of a strategic arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union.

“They just set up unnecessary hurdles for themselves,” he said. “And I don’t think we’re asking enough from the Soviets in these talks. There’s a chance for much deeper cuts in strategic weapons, and the Soviets aren’t in much of a position to say no. But we aren’t asking, because we’ve set this deadline for ourselves.”

Other critics have charged that Baker goofed in agreeing last month to drop U.S. and Soviet troop levels in Central Europe to 195,000 each, plus another 30,000 U.S. troops on Europe’s periphery. Some military officers argue that those levels are too low and too rigid to support current NATO strategy for the defense of Western Europe.

“Some people in our own government told the President that 195,000 was their bottom line, and then decided later that 195,000 wasn’t their bottom line,” a Baker aide complained. “It’s a matter of their own incompetence, to put it bluntly.”

In the Middle East, Baker stepped gingerly into the mine field of Arab-Israeli negotiations and made some progress toward bringing the two sides to a conference table--only to be stymied by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s refusal to allow Palestinians from Jerusalem to take part.

Earlier this month, Baker and Bush turned up the pressure on Israel. Baker warned that U.S. aid would be endangered if Israel built new settlements on the occupied West Bank, and Bush said the United States opposed new settlements in East Jerusalem as well. The impasse led to the fall of Shamir’s government--a turn that could either breathe new life into Baker’s peace plan or doom it.

There are other, more sweeping criticisms of Baker’s diplomacy.

Some conservatives still consider Baker too malleable, just as they did when he was Reagan’s pragmatic chief of staff.

“He doesn’t seem to have a game plan other than saying we support everything Gorbachev ever thought of,” complained Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation.

Some liberals complain that Baker and Bush are too reluctant to cut the defense budget and too sluggish in helping reform take root in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

“We are not responding to these changes,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). “It’s negligent. . . . We don’t have a coherent, cohesive foreign policy.”

For the time being, at least, Baker appears at the top of his game. He has the President’s ear, a reservoir of goodwill in Congress and the benefit of a string of good luck abroad.

But more difficult days may lie ahead. Already, the policy of cooperation with Gorbachev is brushing against its limits as the Soviet leader tries to stop Lithuania’s movement toward independence. German unification, which the Administration has cheered on, is running into new complexities.

“Events have been going so much our way that it’s been difficult to screw it up,” said Mandelbaum. “But the test of a foreign policy team is how well they do when events turn sour. And you can see already that more testing times are ahead.”