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Yet he has also become a symbol of the Administration's blind spots. Chief among them is failure to formulate a vision for America's future course in the wake of the cold war. The fundamental principle of American foreign policy since 1945 -- the containment of communism -- makes no sense today. The chief task now is to meet new challenges, like the tough economic competition from Europe and East Asia and the combustible nationalism of a host of small nations. In such a world, none of the past approaches to American policy -- from Woodrow Wilson's global do-goodism to Henry Kissinger's balance-of-power realpolitik -- can be counted on to provide the answers.
And neither, it seems, can Baker. Critics claim that like Bush, Baker is drawn too heavily toward stability. Baker backed the President's impulse to go on supporting Gorbachev even when the ex-Soviet leader's weaknesses were becoming clear. Likewise, the Secretary's attachment to the familiar map of Europe caused him to misread the depth of nationalist feeling among the ethnic enclaves of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union.
"The Administration has done well at responding competently to events as they've occurred, but they haven't developed a strategy for the post-cold war world," says Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East. "Our foreign policy has been too crisis oriented."
In the absence of clearly defined policy goals, even the successful projection of American military power can come to an indecisive conclusion. Two years after the American invasion of Panama, that nation is once again a corrupt parody of democracy. One year after the liberation of Kuwait, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein remains in power, still repressing his own people and threatening the hapless Kurds, while the autocratic Kuwaitis pursue their own abuses against Palestinians in their country.
Baker has also been criticized for his management of the State Department. He has alienated senior career diplomats by relying too heavily on a tight circle of longtime aides brought in from the outside. Among them: policy planning director Dennis Ross; counsellor and Under Secretary for Economic and Agricultural Affairs Robert Zoellick; and Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Margaret Tutwiler. Career types especially resent Baker's decision to replace Thomas Pickering as the U.S. representative to the United Nations. A seasoned and effective diplomat, Pickering held the Security Council in line through 12 anti-Iraq resolutions during the six months leading up to the gulf war. At the height of the gulf crisis last year, someone from the State Department -- presumably under instruction from higher up -- called the U.S. mission at the U.N. demanding to know why Pickering's picture had been on the front page of the New York Times for two days in a row.
Critics say Baker has missed signals that he might have caught if he were less insulated by his tiny team from the Foreign Service and outside experts. He consistently underestimated the power of nationalism in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Preoccupied with Gorbachev and German unification, he did not smell the trouble brewing in Baghdad as Saddam Hussein moved closer to invading Kuwait.