Baker Appeals for Global Aid for Republics

Secretary of State James A. Baker III called on Americans and their allies Thursday to join in a coordinated effort to help the newly independent Soviet republics become prosperous, Western-style democracies and announced that President Bush will summon foreign officials to Washington next month to launch the drive.

In a major speech at Princeton University, Baker also cut the Bush Administration loose from its once-close tie to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, saying that the United States will deal directly with the 12 republics and “any common entity” they choose to form.

“We will work with those republics--and with any common entity--which commit to responsible security policies, democratic political practices and free-market economics,” Baker said. “Clearly, some--Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan--already are showing their intention to accept the responsibilities of the democratic community of nations.

“Here is what . . . the West must do,” Baker said. “As we organized an alliance against Stalinism during the Cold War, today America can mobilize a coalition in support of freedom. . . .

“The wreckage of communism is too large for any one nation to go it alone,” he said, calling on Japan, South Korea, European countries and oil-rich countries in the Middle East to join in the effort.

“The United States could put to work the scientists at Los Alamos and Livermore who designed the weapons of the Cold War to help the Soviets destroy their weapons of mass destruction now,” he said. “America . . . along with Japan and South Korea could help develop the resource-rich Soviet Far East. The Nordic countries could focus on the Baltics as well as St. Petersburg. And the International Monetary Fund and World Bank could expand dramatically their engagement with reform-minded republics.”

Aides said that Baker’s speech--the first comprehensive U.S. policy statement since the Soviet Union began disintegrating with Ukraine’s declaration of independence Dec. 1--was aimed both at adjusting the Administration’s policy to the new realities and at reviving an international aid effort that has bogged down in confusion.

“We think we’re at a critical moment,” said a senior official who helped draft the speech. “We have an opportunity to help democracy succeed. And if democracy fails, we could be faced by--in the best case--anarchy and--in the worst case--a xenophobic reaction in a country with 30,000 nuclear weapons.”

Another official said: “This is an acceptance of reality. It is a letting-go of Gorbachev.”

Baker’s speech was also aimed in part at the new post-Soviet leaders themselves, aides said--especially a section explaining U.S. concerns over control of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Baker said the Administration would accept a new system of joint command over Soviet nuclear weapons that put the warheads under the shared control of the four nuclear-equipped republics--Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus. But he warned that any such system must produce “safe, responsible and reliable control under a single, unified authority.”

Officials said that formula, which matches proposals made by Russian Federation President Boris N. Yeltsin, was the product of a long debate within the Administration. Some U.S. officials initially had preferred that all Soviet nuclear weapons be turned over to the Russian Federation, but it gradually became clear that the other republics would resist that idea.

Baker said the United States will “accelerate” an effort to send experts to Moscow to advise the republics on how to control and dismantle their nuclear weapons and said that the Administration has agreed to use $400 million offered by Congress to help fund that process.

Baker’s economic aid proposal amounted in large part to a Marshall Plan with other people’s money--an echo of the 1947 U.S. plan to rebuild Western Europe but relying on private investment and financing from many countries.

For the short run, he offered relatively modest U.S. humanitarian aid programs to help the Soviet republics survive a difficult winter: $165 million in agricultural grants, $100 million voted by Congress to transport emergency aid and an undetermined amount of leftover food from the Persian Gulf War.

Later, he said, the Administration will devise a $100-million program of technical aid intended to “catalyze” private investment in the new post-Soviet economies, with the money to be drawn from other foreign-aid accounts.

But any major direct aid, officials said, must come from other countries or from multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, because the Administration does not want to request more foreign aid funds from Congress.

Bush and Baker hope to use the “coordinating conference” they announced Thursday to mobilize other countries to pick up their share of the immediate humanitarian aid effort--and to serve as a model for cooperative work on longer-term economic development, the officials said.

But they said that details of the conference have yet to be worked out--and noted that Baker has not yet discussed the idea with his counterparts in Japan and Germany, two countries whose participation would be key. “We’ve discussed the general issue with the Japanese, and they are more and more willing to help, but we haven’t talked with them on this,” said one senior official.

The conference proposal has only been discussed at lower levels. Invitees may be foreign or finance ministers, or other officials, from both Western and Eastern Europe, as well as from Japan, South Korea and Arab Gulf War allies. Chiefs of state will not attend.

Several Democratic members of Congress, who previously had criticized the Administration for moving too slowly on Soviet aid, praised Baker’s speech.

“Until the announcement, the Administration’s response (to Soviet events) . . . has been tepid and piecemeal,” said Rep. Les Aspin (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. “Today, there was a qualitative step forward.”

Baker noted that helping reformers succeed in the Soviet republics would not be easy and that some republics had shown little progress toward democracy.

“There are likely to be islands of democracy and free markets that have to stand as bulwarks against other islands of chaos on authoritarianism, perhaps even fascism,” he said. He named the republic of Georgia, led by a nationalist strongman, as a republic that is “undeserving of our acceptance and support.”

Still, he praised the disintegration of the old, centralized Soviet system as “an anti-imperialist revolution” that arrived hand-in-hand with the spread of democracy.

In a poignant passage early in his speech, Baker praised the Soviet Union’s last president as the author of those changes.

“These achievements were possible primarily because of one man, Mikhail Gorbachev,” he said. “The transformations we are dealing with now would not have begun were it not for him. His place in history is secure, for he helped end the Cold War peacefully--and for that the world is grateful and respectful.”

But it was the diplomatic equivalent of a gold watch. For as Baker went on to speak of the new political, economic and military ties between the Soviet republics and the West, he never mentioned Gorbachev again.