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Once the crisis erupted, Baker reacted quickly and efficiently. His skills as negotiator and tactician proved essential in putting together the anti- Saddam alliance. But when Kuwait was liberated, the Administration's feeble political planning for the war's aftermath was laid bare. Concerned that a weakened Iraq might leave a vacuum for Iranian power to fill and prompt Turkish Kurds to join their Iraqi compatriots in a breakaway country, Washington stood back while Saddam turned his guns against Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites. Comments an Administration official: "When Bush and Baker confront the breakup of a nation-state, whether it's Iraq, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union, they instinctively reach for an older, more traditional kind of world."
The same preference for stability has shaped the Administration's policy on China. The White House has consistently fought attempts by Congress to punish Beijing for its suppression of human rights. Bush is almost certain to veto a measure approved by the Senate last week. It would impose stringent conditions on the annual renewal of China's most-favored-nation trading status in July, requiring China to release all political prisoners, effectively open its markets to U.S. goods and take "clear and unequivocal" steps to curb sales of arms and nuclear technology abroad. Baker also rejects this ultimatum.
Though Baker gets credit in European capitals for pushing early for German unification, he is criticized by some Europeans for insisting that NATO remain the main vehicle for the exercise of American influence on the Continent. There is also concern that the U.S. is too inattentive to the volatile situations in central and southeastern Europe and unresponsive to the huge problems of the former Soviet Union. It was mid-December by the time Baker got around to calling for an international conference to help the new republics through the winter. Last month he dashed through half a dozen former Soviet republics without making any concrete promise of further assistance to stabilize their economies. "The Bush Administration is acting as if any participation in this great transformation is radioactive," says Michael Mandelbaum, a Soviet expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
"We're suffering enormously from the lack of an integrated approach that makes foreign economic policy a primary task of the post-cold war effort," says Peter Tarnoff, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "Baker's a natural to play that role, and if he's not doing it, it's not being done."
Perhaps history will rate Baker as the right man for the end of the cold war, a deft and prudent player of the good cards dealt him by the collapse of communism. But in a fragmented and challenging new world, American foreign policy needs a conceptual overhaul, the kind of coherent vision that it got in a simpler past from such men as Dean Acheson and George Kennan. A seat-of-the- pants approach to international relations, even one with its share of ! short-term successes, will not preserve American leadership.