THE OLD CAUCASUS spa town of Kislovodsk was in terminal decline, much like the Soviet Union itself. It was late April 1991, and Secretary Baker and the rest of us in his bone-tired delegation had just arrived from Damascus. With Baker scheduled to meet with Soviet foreign minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh the next morning, we stumbled around in the evening gloom to find our rooms in the official guesthouse, long past its glory days as a haven for the party elite. My room was lit by a single overhead bulb. The handle on the toilet came off when I tried to flush it, and what trickled out of the faucet had the same sulfurous smell and reddish tint as the mineral waters for which the town was famous. It wasn’t a particularly alluring setting, but I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours and longed to collapse in the bed, rusty springs and all.
First I had to deliver a set of briefing points to the secretary. I walked down to his suite, which was bigger and better lit than the other rooms, although with similarly understated décor. The State Department security agent stationed outside the door knocked and let me in. Baker was sitting at a desk reading press clips, still in his crisp white dress shirt and characteristic green tie. He smiled wearily and motioned me to sit down. The secretary’s stamina and focus on preparation were legendary, but he was exhausted. A day before, he had spent nine hours in a diplomatic cage fight with Syrian president Assad. Nearly motionless as he sat in his overstuffed armchair, Assad had relished the endurance contest with Baker, spinning out long monologues about Syria’s history and regional intrigues, and ordering enough tea to overwhelm even the hardiest bladders. Unintimidated and undefeated in Damascus, Baker was nevertheless worn out.
He glanced at the paper I handed him. The range of issues that he was going to discuss with Bessmertnykh would have been hard to imagine at the outset of Baker’s tenure two years before. There were points on Germany’s peaceful reunification in the fall of 1990, and background notes on the Soviet Union’s increasingly uncertain future, with hardliners battling reformers, Gorbachev beset by independence-minded republics, and the economy in free fall. Historic negotiations were under way to lock in conventional and nuclear arms reductions. And in the Middle East, Baker was seeking to capitalize on the military triumph over Saddam Hussein and produce an Arab-Israeli peace conference, ideally with Soviet co-sponsorship.
Looking up from the memo and across the tattered furnishings of his suite, Baker asked, “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I assured him I hadn’t, and started to tell him all about my new handleless toilet. “That’s not what I meant,” he said, unable to restrain his laughter. “I’m talking about the world. Have you ever seen so many things changing so damn fast?” Embarrassed, I acknowledged that I hadn’t. “This sure is quite a time,” he said. “I bet you won’t see anything like it for as long as you stay in the Foreign Service.”
He was right. For all the exceptional people and complicated challenges I have since encountered, the intersection of skilled public servants and transformative events that I witnessed in the Baker years at the State Department remains special. The end of the Cold War, the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the successful reversal of Iraqi aggression marked a new era in international order.
President George H. W. Bush was well suited for the unprecedented changes unfolding around him, drawing on his eight years in the White House as vice president, his tenure as CIA director, and his life in the diplomatic arena, first as ambassador to the United Nations and then as envoy to China. Jim Baker was his closest friend, a wily political player, a former White House chief of staff and secretary of the treasury. Brent Scowcroft became the model for future national security advisors, forging a close bond with President Bush, managing the policy process with fairness and efficiency, and displaying consistently sound judgment and personal integrity. Dick Cheney was a strong leader at the Pentagon, well versed in national security issues as well as the dark arts of Washington politics. Colin Powell had become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, bringing with him not only a stellar record of military service but also his successful tenure as Reagan’s national security advisor.
Their combination of policy skill and political acumen served our country well when the tectonic plates of geopolitics began moving in dramatic and unexpected ways. This was a team that had its inevitable imperfections and blind spots, and its share of misjudgments and disagreements, but as a group they were as steady and sound as any I ever saw. At one of those rare hinge points in history, they were realistic about the potency as well as the limits of American influence. They realized that American dominance could lead to hubris and overreach, but they had a largely affirmative view of how American leadership could shape and manage international currents, if not control them. Theirs was an example that I never forgot, and that every successive administration tried to reach.
I OWED MY entry onto the fringes of Baker’s circle to my old boss, Dennis Ross. After the campaign, in which he served as Bush’s foreign policy advisor, Dennis chose to go with Baker to the State Department. He judged, correctly, that the secretary’s tight relationship with the president would make him the key player in American diplomacy. As director of the Policy Planning Staff, Dennis was given responsibility for two critical issues, the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Sitting on the steps of the Old Executive Office Building one sunny late November afternoon, he asked if I’d join him as his principal deputy. I accepted—uncertain about another professional leap for which I felt unprepared.
Jim Baker ran the State Department through a tight, close-knit group, working out of a string of offices along the seventh floor’s “mahogany row.” At one end of the wood-paneled hallway sat Deputy Secretary Larry Eagleburger, a rumpled, blunt-spoken, chain-smoking Foreign Service veteran, sometimes bursting at the seams of his aspirationally sized pinstriped suits. Baker relied on Eagleburger to manage the building and help ensure harmonious coordination with Brent Scowcroft, Eagleburger’s longtime friend and colleague under Henry Kissinger. At the other end sat Bob Zoellick, who served as counselor, and later undersecretary for economic affairs. Still only in his mid-thirties, Bob was brilliant, creative, and incredibly disciplined. He was precisely the kind of talent Baker needed by his side at a moment when the shelf life of conventional wisdom often seemed to be measured in days, not years.
Sitting in an office with a connecting door to the secretary’s suite was Margaret Tutwiler. Though she was nominally assistant secretary for public affairs and department spokesperson, Margaret’s actual role was far more expansive. She had served under Baker in the Reagan White House and at Treasury, and was fiercely protective of his image and political flanks. Beneath her Southern graciousness, Margaret was tough as nails, with exceptional instincts about people. Just beyond her office was Bob Kimmitt’s set of offices as undersecretary for political affairs, the number three job in the department. Kimmitt’s roots with Baker also went back to the Reagan White House. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, Kimmitt had a quick mind and immense organizational ability. He oversaw the department’s regional bureaus, and played a crucial role in managing the day-to-day policy process. Between Kimmitt and Zoellick sat Dennis and me, a few corridors removed from the rest of the Policy Planning Staff.
Baker had mastered the politics of foreign policymaking. He knew how to maneuver people and bureaucracies, and his feel for the international landscape was intuitive and pragmatic. He was a superb problem-solver, and made no pretense of being a national security intellectual or grand strategist. He was cautious by nature, and always attuned to the risks of unforeseen second- and third-order consequences. He was unchained by ideology and open to alternative views and challenges to convention. He was as good a negotiator as I ever saw, always thoroughly prepared, conscious of his leverage, sensitive to the needs and limits of those on the other side of the table, and with a lethal sense of when to close the deal.
Baker deftly used his closest advisors to run the institution and supply the innovation and imagination he sought, with just the right touch on the reins to draw on the strengths of each of them. He could rely on Zoellick and Ross for ideas and strategy; Eagleburger and Kimmitt to get things done and steer the bureaucracy; and Tutwiler to watch his back and avoid political landmines. While Baker’s early, closed style produced predictable grumbling at State, it evolved considerably over time. The accelerating pace of events and his own growing appreciation of the skills of career personnel encouraged him to rely on a wider circle. Career professionals were drawn in and exhilarated by Baker’s clout and success, which put State at the center of American diplomacy at a time of massive global change.
I had always been intrigued by the Policy Planning Staff, which had been launched in 1947 by Secretary George Marshall, and whose first director was George Kennan, the Foreign Service legend and architect of the Cold War strategy of containment. Marshall’s charge to Kennan and the five staff members he assembled was to “develop long-term programs for the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives.” He added one laconic bit of advice: “Avoid trivia.”1 Kennan and his colleagues played a pivotal role in devising the Marshall Plan, and in laying the early foundations for American policy during the Cold War. After Marshall left State in 1949, Kennan grew disenchanted with both what he saw to be the militarization of his original concept of containment and Dean Acheson’s less sympathetic view of Policy Planning’s bureaucratic prerogatives. His influence waning, he soon left the department for a sabbatical at Princeton.
The role of Policy Planning varied widely in significance after Kennan. Subsequent directors often struggled to sustain the attention of secretaries of state, and to find an effective balance between long-term strategy and the operational challenges that preoccupy the secretary and the rest of the department on any given day. Successful Planning Staffs, such as Kissinger’s, did both.
Baker’s Policy Planning Staff was as consequential as Kissinger’s or Marshall’s. Baker treated it as his own mini–National Security Council staff, relying on us for ambitious initiatives as the Cold War was ending, speechwriting, tactical support on his travels, and the briefing papers and talking points and press statements that fueled the diplomatic machine. His relatively insular style, as well as the drama and scope of world events, gave Policy Planning a huge (and daunting) opportunity to shape strategies and decisions.
We eventually grew to thirty-one staff members, drawn from career ranks at State, the Pentagon, and CIA, as well as an eclectic group from outside government. I served as Dennis’s principal deputy and alter ego, doing my best to help lead and manage the staff, and frequently traveling with Baker. The staff was full of stars—scholars like John Ikenberry and Frank Fukuyama, whose article on “The End of History” was about to catapult him to fame; FSOs like Russia hand Tom Graham, the always irreverent Bill Brownfield, and my good friend Dan Kurtzer; and civil servants like Aaron Miller, another close friend and Middle East specialist, and Bob Einhorn, one of the government’s premier arms control experts. We had gifted political appointees, like Andrew Carpendale, Walter Kansteiner, and John Hannah; talented if overworked speechwriters; and young interns like Derek Chollet, one of the most promising foreign policy minds of his generation.
It was a remarkable group, and a heady time. Our connection to Baker and privileged status in the department did not endear us much to the rest of the institution, so I spent a fair amount of energy trying to build a collegial reputation for our team. Still, it was no surprise when Tom Friedman, then the New York Times correspondent at the State Department, wrote in the fall of 1989 that we were viewed by many in the department as “a group of still-wet-behind-the-ears whippersnappers with too much authority for their tender years.”2
WET BEHIND THE ears or not, nothing would have prepared us for the events of 1989.
Having served as central players throughout the Reagan administration, President Bush and Secretary Baker were intimately familiar with their inheritance. They knew that Central America would remain a major source of partisan strife and a potential drain on the Bush administration’s foreign policy capital on the Hill. They were more optimistic about Asia, and at least initially encouraged by the trajectory of relations with China. Japan’s economic boom was real, but its threat to our own economy was grossly exaggerated. The vast expanse from Afghanistan to Morocco seemed more settled than it had been in some time: The last Soviet troops departed Afghanistan on the eve of President Bush’s inauguration in January 1989, the Iran-Iraq War was over, and threats to shipping and access to Gulf oil had receded. The beginning of dialogue with the PLO seemed to offer a modest new opening on the Arab-Israeli peace front, even as violence continued between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza.
The central drama, however, was unfolding in the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev was still trying to reform Soviet rule, aiming to reverse a perilous economic decline while preserving Communist Party rule at home and Soviet influence abroad. He faced mounting problems: economic decay; food shortages; a hostile old guard in the party; growing ethnic unrest and separatist sentiment in non-Russian republics; restive allies in Eastern Europe; and an increasingly disillusioned public. And yet few expected the imminent demise of the Soviet bloc, let alone the Soviet Union itself.
Reagan, the old Cold Warrior, had seemed in his later years in office to understand the desperation in Gorbachev’s maneuvers and the terminal rot in the Soviet system. But Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and their colleagues remained skeptical. They entered office determined not to be hoodwinked by Gorbachev. If he failed, it was not apparent that the Soviet Union would fail; it seemed more likely that hardliners would supplant him and restore the hard edge of the Cold War.
Bush and Baker took a careful approach to managing relations with Gorbachev during the first half of 1989. At the president’s direction, Brent Scowcroft and his deputy, Bob Gates, launched a long interagency review of our policy toward the Soviet Union. As the review proceeded, Gates called for a “conscious pause” in U.S.-Soviet diplomacy. “A lot has happened in the relationship in an ad hoc way,” Gates wrote. “We’ve been making policy—or trying to—in response to what the Soviets are doing, rather than with a sense of strategy about what we should be doing.”3 Baker was careful in his first meeting with his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, that March in Vienna, and in conversations with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in Moscow in May. He made clear to both that the Bush administration appreciated the sweep and potential of the changes they were attempting, but also emphasized that neither he nor the president appreciated being cornered by bold public proposals or acts of “one-upmanship” designed to portray Washington as the recalcitrant party. For Scowcroft and Gates, as well as for Cheney, the jury was still out on Gorbachev. As Scowcroft later put it, “Were we once again mistaking a tactical shift in the Soviet Union for a fundamental transformation of the relationship?”4
My colleagues and I in Policy Planning played an active role in the internal review process, but grew restive with its methodical pace, especially as events in the former Soviet bloc gathered speed in the spring of 1989. Free elections took place in the Soviet Union for the Congress of People’s Deputies, giving fiery new figures like Boris Yeltsin a nationally televised platform to press for faster changes. Elections in June in Poland swept Solidarity into power, forming the first non-Communist government in postwar Eastern Europe. Later that month, Hungary removed the barbed wire along its border with Austria, and two hundred thousand Hungarians attended the reburial of Imre Nagy, the officially rehabilitated leader of the 1956 revolution. True to his “Sinatra Doctrine” of nonintervention in the political evolution of Eastern Europe, Gorbachev let the Poles and Hungarians do things their way.
By the fall of 1989, the pace of change convinced Baker that the United States could no longer afford to take the wary, risk-averse approach favored by the Pentagon and NSC staff. Their argument was essentially that the administration should hold out for Gorbachev to make more concessions as his position weakened. Baker, however, advocated a more activist policy—a systematic effort to shape a rapidly changing European landscape and lock in strategic advantages in partnership with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze. Beginning in early September, we sent Baker a series of papers that outlined alternative scenarios for the USSR if Gorbachev’s reform efforts collapsed. They ranged from the gradual crumbling of the Soviet system to a military coup and authoritarian modernization, but they all underscored the urgency of the moment and the value of doing all we could to support constructive change. In a conversation in his office that autumn, Baker told us that “history won’t forgive us if we miss this opportunity because we were too passive or not creative enough.” With Baker’s careful prodding, President Bush was coming around to this view too.
In late September, Baker hosted Shevardnadze and a large Soviet delegation for several days of talks near his modest ranch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. The setting was spectacular, with the Tetons looming above the lodge where the talks took place, and the Snake River running nearby. Shevardnadze clearly appreciated Baker’s informal hospitality and their budding friendship.
Eduard Shevardnadze was a fascinating figure, a product of the Soviet system who saw its flaws in cold relief and had the courage to try to do something about them. A proud native of Georgia, he understood the forces of nationalism bubbling within the Soviet Union better than most senior leaders. He was also unflinching in his diagnosis of the paralytic Soviet economy, and far more realistic in his assessment of the dangers of a conservative reaction against reform than Gorbachev, the ebullient optimist. On the wider international stage, Shevardnadze understood that rapidly declining Soviet leverage required an effort to build a new relationship with the United States, as a way of both stabilizing the situation at home and preserving as much of the Soviet Union’s global role as possible. In Baker, Shevardnadze found a similarly pragmatic partner.
There was tangible progress on a number of issues at Jackson Hole. Shevardnadze made clear that the Soviets would no longer link significant reductions in nuclear arms to the future of missile defense, a major breakthrough that would lead eventually to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 1991, the largest and most significant arms control treaty ever negotiated. Logjams were broken on bilateral agreements on nuclear testing and chemical weapons. And the Soviet foreign minister said flatly that arms shipments to Nicaragua would cease, and that Moscow would press the Cubans to stop their shipments too.
Shevardnadze also impressed Baker with his candor on the domestic challenges that Gorbachev faced. Rather than give formulaic responses when Baker raised American concerns about possible Soviet use of force against protestors in the Baltic states or striking coal miners in Russia, Shevardnadze was blunt about the unreconstructed views of some in the Soviet leadership, and the risks of violence. He resisted Baker’s suggestion that Gorbachev begin to “cut loose” the Baltic states, explaining his worries about the chain reaction that might cause in other parts of the USSR. The overall directness and depth of their conversations solidified Baker’s activist inclination, and helped prepare the ground for Bush’s summit meeting with Gorbachev in Malta that December.
Baker went on to lay out the administration’s evolving approach in a series of speeches and public statements in October. He argued that perestroika’s success would be determined by the Soviets themselves, but that it created an historic opportunity for a new relationship with the United States based on greater “points of mutual advantage.” Advances in arms control and resolution of regional conflicts were obvious examples; Baker also offered technical assistance in support of Soviet economic reforms, and painted a wider picture of “a Europe whole and free.”
Meanwhile, it was hard to keep track of events in Eastern Europe. On November 9, a bungled attempt to relax restrictions on travel to the West resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Dennis Ross and I sat in his office that Thursday afternoon watching the riveting CNN footage of Berliners hammering chunks out of the wall, we could see that the world we had known was changing—we just could have never predicted how much, how far, or how fast. Within weeks, popular movements toppled autocrats in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. We tried to think ahead, and in a subsequent Policy Planning paper laid out a series of initiatives aimed at “consolidating the revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe.”5 Noting that “the post-communist reconstruction of Eastern Europe is no less challenging than the post-Nazi reconstruction of Western Europe,” we pressed for concrete programs of technical and economic support, in cooperation with our European allies, and without provoking the Soviets.
By the time Gorbachev and Bush had their shipboard summit in stormy Mediterranean seas off Malta a month after the fall of the wall, the Soviet empire was no more. Gorbachev was matter-of-fact, telling Bush that they were “simply doomed to dialogue, coordination and cooperation. There is no other choice.”6 Building on the Jackson Hole discussions, they agreed to major nuclear and conventional forces cuts. Most interestingly, they signaled the possibility of a reunited, democratic Germany—a reality that had seemed unimaginable for the better part of four decades.
Nowhere was Baker’s diplomatic agility and foresight more evident than in the rapid sequence of events that led, in less than a year, from the tearing down of the Berlin Wall to Germany’s formal reunification, within NATO, in October 1990. In discussions in Policy Planning in mid-November 1989, Frank Fukuyama proposed that Baker take the initiative and frame a series of principles on German reunification. In a subsequent memo to the secretary, Frank stressed several basic points: Germans—not outside powers—should determine their own future; reunification should occur in the context of Germany’s continued commitment to NATO, taking into account the legal role and responsibility of the four Allied powers (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union); the process should be gradual, peaceful, and step-by-step; and the Helsinki Act provisions on the inviolability of borders should apply. These early American principles helped set the tone and shape of the subsequent diplomatic process. They also helped Baker address Germany’s determination to make its own choices about its future; the early skepticism of the French and British about any rapid move to reunification; and the obvious worries of the Soviets about the strategic consequences of a united Germany. Shaping the principles of policy debate, I learned, is often the first step toward winning it.
Baker also had to overcome more cautious sentiments within the White House and other parts of the administration. One paper from the European Affairs Bureau at State counseled Baker to avoid being “stampeded” into premature diplomatic initiatives. Zoellick and Ross strongly disagreed. For several years, Zoellick kept the memo on his desk and used it to remind me, only partly in jest, of the overly cautious mindset of the Foreign Service. Baker hardly needed to be persuaded. Given the breathtaking pace of change in 1989, he had no interest in sitting on the sidelines.
We spent much of the Christmas holiday working to devise a framework that would translate Fukuyama’s principles into a practical process. The memo that resulted outlined a “Two Plus Four” process, in which West Germany and East Germany would shape internal arrangements, and the four Allied powers would help guide external arrangements. Dennis sent it to Baker in late January 1990, and the secretary quickly realized the utility of the concept—the first part addressed the needs of the Germans (and the concerns of some in the administration), and the second addressed those of the Soviets, French, and British. With President Bush’s support, Baker sold the concept to German chancellor Helmut Kohl and foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher in early February, agreeing to use Two Plus Four negotiations to press for rapid German unification and full NATO membership, while reassuring the Soviets that NATO would not be extended any farther to the east, and would be transformed to reflect the end of the Cold War and potential partnership with the Soviet Union.
In meetings a few days later with Shevardnadze and Gorbachev in Moscow, Baker won their initial support, and began the effort to ease their resistance to membership of a unified Germany in NATO. Baker maintained that Soviet interests would be more secure with a united Germany wrapped up in NATO, rather than a Germany untied to NATO and perhaps eventually with its own nuclear weapons. He also said that there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction or forces “one inch to the east” of the borders of a reunified Germany. The Russians took him at his word and would feel betrayed by NATO enlargement in the years that followed, even though the pledge was never formalized and was made before the breakup of the Soviet Union. It was an episode that would be relitigated for many years to come.
The Two Plus Four approach was broadly blessed at a meeting of foreign ministers in Ottawa in mid-February and announced by Baker and Genscher. In May, Gorbachev conceded to Bush that Germany should be able to choose its own alliance arrangements. Increasingly beleaguered by unrest and economic stagnation at home, with violence and mounting separatist movements in the Baltics and the South Caucasus, Gorbachev had dwindling leverage. Bush provided him with a series of informal assurances about the nonthreatening evolution of NATO, reinforcing Baker’s earlier commitments. In July, Kohl and Gorbachev announced a sweeping agreement on German reunification, within NATO. On October 3, 1990, the new, united Germany formally emerged.
GIVEN THE HISTORIC drama unfolding in Europe, it was not surprising that Middle East policy had taken a backseat during Bush’s first eighteen months in office. That all changed at the beginning of August 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
All of us in the administration underestimated Saddam’s sense of both risk and opportunity. He had ruined Iraq’s economy during eight years of war with Iran, which left the urban infrastructure in a shambles, produced a war debt of more than $100 billion, and cost half a million Iraqi lives. Neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia had any interest in writing off his debt or in conspiring to raise oil prices. Despite his brutally repressive grip, Saddam worried that a bleak economic outlook would make Iraqis restive. At the same time, he saw opportunity in popular trends in the region. It wasn’t hard to cloak himself as a militant Arab nationalist, first the defender of the Arab world against Persian theocrats, and now the champion of Arabs oppressed by corrupt rulers beholden to the Americans and soft on Israel. Moreover, he assumed the end of the Cold War meant Washington would have less incentive to intervene in the Middle East, and could be warned off with a sufficient display of strength.
America’s Arab partners were not much more astute about Saddam. President Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein, and King Fahd all had encouraged Bush to reach out to the Iraqi dictator. With the end of the Iran-Iraq War, their view was that Saddam would naturally turn his attention to domestic recovery and modernization. Iraq would remain a bulwark against revolutionary Iran, and a complicated neighbor, but not a short-term threat. During his first year in office, Bush cautiously probed the possibilities with Baghdad. The United States extended credit guarantees for Iraqi grain purchases, and Baker met with his Iraqi counterpart, the wily Tariq Aziz. But by the spring of 1990, the secretary had begun to take a harder view, especially after Saddam made a vituperative speech threatening to “burn Israel.” Ross told Baker that it was an “illusion” to think that Saddam could be a reliable partner.
Meanwhile, Saddam resurrected a long-standing border dispute with the Kuwaitis, and accused them of waging “economic warfare.” By midsummer, he had begun to mass troops on the Kuwaiti border. The allure of Kuwait for Saddam was obvious. Its annual GDP was nearly half the size of Iraq’s; with its oil fields, Saddam could control more than 10 percent of global oil supply and quickly be in a position to write off his war debt. The risks seemed modest—the Kuwaiti military would be no match for his combat-hardened forces.
Mubarak and other Arab leaders continued to assure Bush that Saddam was just bluffing and seeking to improve his hand in negotiations with the Kuwaitis over their border dispute. When Saddam unexpectedly summoned U.S. ambassador April Glaspie for a meeting on July 25, she reiterated formal American policy: The United States did not take a position on the merits of Iraqi-Kuwaiti territorial differences, but did certainly take the position that they had to be resolved peacefully. Afterward, in her cable to Washington, Glaspie concluded that the United States had “fully caught Saddam’s attention” and that he had committed to opening negotiations with Kuwait soon.7 She was widely criticized later for not being emphatic enough with Saddam about the consequences of the use of force, but that was unfair. No one expected Saddam to launch a full-scale invasion, and President Bush sent a letter to Saddam on July 28 that was not much tougher in tone or substance than Glaspie’s exchange.
Undeterred, Saddam sent his military across the border into Kuwait on August 2, occupied the entire country within two days, and immediately declared Kuwait to be Iraq’s “nineteenth province.” Baker had been in Siberia the day before, meeting Shevardnadze. He shared with Shevardnadze intelligence reports of the Iraqi military buildup, as well as his mounting concern, but Shevardnadze was as dismissive of the chances of an actual invasion as Arab leaders were. Baker then flew on to Mongolia for a previously scheduled visit, and was there when the Iraqi attack began. Ross advised him to travel directly to Moscow and issue a joint statement with Shevardnadze condemning Saddam’s aggression. Nothing would carry more diplomatic impact, or symbolize more vividly how much U.S.-Soviet relations had changed. On August 3, barely twenty-four hours after the invasion began, Shevardnadze and Baker stood together at Vnukovo Airport outside the Soviet capital and denounced the attack. As Baker later wrote, that moment really did mark the end of the Cold War.
On August 4, Policy Planning made a first attempt to try to frame what was at stake. Entitled “The First Post–Cold War Crisis,” our note read, “Saddam believes that the end of the Cold War has fundamentally changed the basic strategic calculations of both superpowers. Their main purpose for competition in Southwest Asia has been reduced and with it the priority they will place on preserving their cold war alliances. Part of the reason for the shift in Soviet and American policy, Saddam figures, is the dramatically increased cost of power projection and active involvement in regional conflicts. Saddam, like Khomeini ten years ago, is convinced that the myth of American power is far greater in the Middle East than its practical bite, and that if confronted with real costs, Washington will not stay the course.”8
Our paper continued, “Saddam is also banking on what he believes is a fundamental trend in Arab attitudes and politics. The process of change in Eastern Europe has excited many Arab intellectuals and the economic frustrations of boom and bust oil revenues along with urbanization has provided Islamist and nationalist demagogues with a ready mass base. Saddam is appealing to nationalist radical symbols, partly to outflank the Islamist radicals, and is playing to a widespread mass inclination to blame the U.S. for their political and economic troubles. His calculation is that any Arab regime that has to depend on the U.S. for protection is vulnerable to internal insurrection.”
Our prescription was straightforward. We needed to defend Saudi Arabia, and then reverse Saddam’s aggression. In a second, more detailed memo two weeks later, we underscored the argument: “With all that is now at stake in the Gulf, we cannot afford to settle for an outcome less than complete Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government.”9 The paper laid out a two-step approach: First, bring maximum multilateral political and economic pressure to bear on Saddam; then follow up with a sustained program of containment to deny him any escape from the domestic consequences of having failed in Kuwait and capitulated to the Iranians.
If Saddam did not back down, the second purpose of our diplomacy would be to serve as a foundation for international support for military action against Iraq. Being perceived to have exhausted all reasonable nonmilitary options would be critical to building and maintaining such support. Inability to pressure Saddam to withdraw by means short of force would not be a “failure” of diplomacy—it would rather be the shrewdest kind of diplomacy, creating the basis for an international coalition that could achieve Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and manage the aftermath.
The dilemma we faced, however, was that we did not have much time, since Saddam was cleverly exploiting potential fissures in the international consensus. President Bush had succinctly laid out the American bottom line in a statement to the press soon after Saddam’s invasion: The occupation of Kuwait, he said, “will not stand.” He and his team then moved to accomplish that goal, with a skill and drive as fine as any example I saw in government. Dick Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia, where he announced a military operation to defend the Saudis, dubbed Operation Desert Shield. Colin Powell and his commander in the field, General Norman Schwarzkopf, began mobilizing U.S. forces for deployment in the region. Brent Scowcroft and Bob Gates managed an impressive interagency process and pushed the strategy forward. Secretary Baker coordinated with Scowcroft, Cheney, and Powell on building a massive international coalition, attracting military and financial contributions, marshaling economic pressure on Saddam, and creating a powerful diplomatic foundation for action. At the United Nations, Ambassador Tom Pickering expertly set in motion a series of Security Council resolutions, first condemning the Iraqi attack, then putting in place economic sanctions unprecedented in their scope, which would eventually cut off nearly all of Iraq’s exports and external sources of revenue.
I joined Baker on his September “tin cup” mission, covering nine countries in eleven days. He ultimately secured more than $50 billion in contributions, essentially defraying the entire cost of the U.S. military operation. Baker’s style was no-nonsense. He had a checklist of what he needed, and a rapidly growing U.S. military deployment in the Gulf to underline his credibility. In Jeddah, King Fahd dispensed with typical Arab indirection and told Baker the Saudis would provide whatever he wanted. The Kuwaiti amir, huddled with his family and government in Saudi exile, was just as receptive. The Turks immediately shut down the pipeline through which much of Iraqi oil exports flowed, and Baker arranged a substantial World Bank loan to help cushion the effects on Ankara. In Egypt, President Mubarak pledged to send Egyptian troops to join the coalition. While their military value was negligible, the symbolic power of Arab contingents alongside U.S. forces was considerable.
Baker also visited Damascus on that trip, beginning a series of encounters with the cunning and ruthless Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s president since 1971. Unsentimental about Saddam, a rival of many years from the same rough school of Arab leadership, Assad was impressed by the display of raw American power unfolding in the Gulf. Assad indicated a receptiveness to joining the coalition, and was clearly intrigued by Baker. He was even more intrigued by the prospect of sticking it to Saddam.
In Bonn, Kohl and Genscher, already in political debt to Bush and Baker for their support for German reunification, promised financial support. Baker joined Bush in Helsinki for another summit with Gorbachev. The Soviet leader, struggling increasingly with the challenge of holding the USSR together, saw the value of using his relationship with Bush to preserve a central diplomatic role despite the Soviet Union’s waning international prestige.
In November, I accompanied Baker on an even longer trip. This one covered twelve countries on three continents over eighteen days. Its principal aim was to shore up support for a decisive Security Council resolution to authorize the use of force if Saddam did not withdraw fully and unconditionally from Kuwait. Traveling on Baker’s aircraft, which had been Lyndon Johnson’s Air Force One, was always an intense experience.
Baker had a small private cabin up front, with a tiny desk and a couch on which he could barely stretch out. The rest of his senior staff sat in the adjacent cabin, which featured a horseshoe of couches around a large table, and the oversized chair that Johnson had often used when meeting with his aides. The pace was frenetic, with short sessions with Baker to review what had just transpired in the last stop and plan for the next one, and the rest of the flight spent making calls to Washington, preparing talking points for upcoming meetings, and drafting short reports for Baker to send to the president. Sleep was rare.
In the next cabin sat an overworked administrative team and diplomatic security detail, juggling all the constantly shifting logistics. At the back of the plane sat the State Department press corps—a particularly accomplished group, including Pulitzer Prize winners like Tom Friedman and The Washington Post’s David Hoffman. Baker and Margaret Tutwiler were masters at managing the press, respectful of their role and expertise. They knew that the relationship was a two-way street, and often tested ideas and formulas in off-the-record sessions on the plane. The department press corps, in turn, knew that Baker was a formidable figure at the heart of history in the making, and treated him with the same respect he showed them.
By the end of that grueling trip, Baker had secured substantial support for what became UN Security Council Resolution 678, passed on November 29, authorizing the use of “all necessary means” to force Saddam out of Kuwait if he did not withdraw by January 15, 1991. The Soviets joined the United States and ten other countries voting in favor of the resolution. The Chinese abstained, uneasy about the use of force and miffed that Baker had not visited Beijing. Cuba and Yemen voted against. Baker, who had spent several hours in Sanaa trying to woo Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, warned that this would be “the most expensive vote the Yemenis ever cast.” He wasn’t kidding. When Saleh declined to support the resolution, the State Department moved quickly to slash assistance to Yemen by 90 percent.
Saddam immediately rejected the UNSC ultimatum, but agreed to a meeting in early January in Geneva between Tariq Aziz and Baker, a last chance to end the crisis peacefully. I had never seen so much drama and anxiety surrounding a single meeting, and haven’t since. War was imminent, with more than half a million coalition troops now assembled near the Kuwaiti border, the most impressive and powerful international coalition since World War II.
There were worries about significant casualties, especially given the potential for use of chemical weapons by Saddam, who had deployed them in the past against the Iranians and his own Kurdish population. There were also fears that Saddam would choose the moment in Geneva to have Aziz offer a partial withdrawal while retaining control of the disputed oil fields along the border. That would be unacceptable under the terms of the Security Council resolutions, but it could undermine congressional support and throw a wrench into the coalition, likely causing the Soviets and others to press for a further pause on military action. The coalition we had worked so hard to build could easily unravel.
Baker’s preparations for the meeting were characteristically exhaustive. His talking points were the product of extensive consultation in Washington. I spent nearly the entire plane ride to Geneva working with Dennis on the final version. Baker never read such points verbatim, but given the gravity of the moment, he planned to stick closely to the script. He had virtually memorized his terse introductory remarks, which ended with him warning that he hoped Aziz understood that this was the “last, best chance for peace.” Even his handshake with Aziz across the table at the start of the meeting had been well thought through; he was determined not to offer the conventional diplomatic smile, and kept a grim expression for the cameras. Aziz, usually full of bravado, looked tense.
Baker was carrying a long letter from Bush to Saddam, which among other things made clear that the United States would reserve the right to use any weapons in its arsenal if the Iraqis resorted to chemical weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction. Baker summarized the contents of the letter, but Aziz refused to take it or read it, perhaps unsure of how Saddam would react if he brought such an ultimatum home. After the meeting ended, with no sign of flexibility from the Iraqis, Baker addressed the biggest assemblage of international media I had ever seen. “Regrettably,” he began, “in over six hours of talks, I heard nothing today that suggested to me any Iraqi flexibility whatsoever on complying with the UN Security Council resolutions.” War was coming.
On January 12, Congress voted to authorize the use of force. Thanks in large part to the international support that Bush and Baker had mobilized, Saddam’s stubborn brutality and intransigence, and polling showing the support of two out of three Americans, skeptical American legislators had come around. On January 16, just after the deadline set by the UN Security Council had expired, the United States launched a massive air attack on Baghdad. I watched it on television at home that evening with Lisa, still uncertain about where this would all lead, but confident in the U.S. military, and proud of all that Bush and Baker had achieved in a classic model of diplomatic coalition-building.
While an overwhelming display of U.S. technological superiority, the air campaign still had its anxious moments. Coalition forces made a high priority of eliminating Iraq’s Scud missile capability, amid fears that Saddam would launch warheads loaded with chemical weapons. Inevitably, some Iraqi missiles struck Israel, which Saddam wanted desperately to bait into retaliation, thus expanding the conflict into an Arab-Israeli war and threatening Arab support for the coalition. Bush and Baker had worked closely with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to defend against Scud attacks, and to avoid walking into the trap that Saddam was trying to set. Larry Eagleburger made several trips to Israel to urge restraint. I accompanied him on one of those missions and admired the gruff ease with which he connected with Shamir and other senior Israelis—and watched with amusement when he removed his gas mask during missile raid alarms to take alternating puffs from his cigarette and asthma inhaler.
Showing political courage, Shamir did not respond to the missile attacks, trusting that the Americans would quickly crush the Iraqi military. The subsequent ground operation in late February lasted barely one hundred hours. Saddam’s forces were routed, expelled from Kuwait, and fleeing headlong back into Iraq when President Bush ended hostilities. Bush’s decision, unanimously supported by his chief advisors, reflected remarkable discipline. It was certainly tempting to continue to pummel the Iraqi military, chase them all the way to Baghdad, and perhaps bring down Saddam’s regime. Bush and Baker knew, however, that the coalition mandate, codified by the UN Security Council, was to push the Iraqis out of Kuwait and restore the legitimate government there. Reaching beyond that goal ran the risk of disintegrating the coalition, with all the collateral damage that might do to shaping post–Cold War order. As Baker put it to a few of us in a conversation in his office after he returned from the White House on February 27, the last day of the ground operation, “Sometimes the most important test of leadership is not to do something, even when it looks really damn easy. Overreaching is what gets people in trouble.”
Despite the focus on the immediate military and diplomatic priorities, we had tried to help Baker think ahead about the long-term opportunities and risks that would undoubtedly emerge after Saddam was forced to withdraw from Kuwait. On the Gulf itself, we argued in a November 1990 paper that a freestanding balance of power among Iraq, Iran, and the Gulf Cooperation Council states was implausible after the crisis.10 We’d have to contain Saddam, and continue to provide support to the Saudis and their Gulf Arab partners. A little too hopefully, we suggested that “this crisis may increase the opportunity to improve U.S.-Iranian relations.” In another piece, we highlighted the wider U.S. regional stake “in quietly encouraging our friends to recognize that broader political participation and greater economic openness are important if the Arab world is to share in the progress sweeping other parts of the world.” We proposed an Arab regional development bank as one way to stimulate change. And we laid special emphasis on the potential for renewing Arab-Israeli negotiations, with Saddam’s brand of radical Arab nationalism discredited and our own regional and global influence virtually unchallenged. Though wary of all the pitfalls, Baker was intrigued by what might be possible on that front.
ON THE WALL outside his office in Houston, former secretary Baker keeps several rows of framed newspaper cartoons. They depict, with varying degrees of cynicism, his relentless pursuit of a breakthrough on Middle East peace following the Gulf War, over nine trips to the region from March to October 1991—a reminder of how many people doubted that he could succeed, and of how improbable the whole effort seemed.
Faced with the monumental demands of dealing with the Soviet Union and Europe at the end of the Cold War, Baker avoided getting drawn into Arab-Israeli issues. In the Middle East, he saw few opportunities and lots of headaches. He had little patience for the endless arguments about peace process theology. His early experience with Prime Minister Shamir, a stubborn Israeli nationalist deeply suspicious of anything that might weaken Israel’s grip on the West Bank and Gaza, had been unhappy. In May 1989, Baker had told the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington that “now is the time to lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a greater Israel.” Shamir was not amused. When Shamir’s protégé, then–deputy foreign minister Bibi Netanyahu, accused the administration of “lies and distortions,” it was Baker’s turn to be unamused. He banned Netanyahu from the State Department for the next eighteen months.
The Arabs did not do much to endear themselves to Baker, either. The U.S. dialogue with the PLO opened at the end of the Reagan administration had been stilted and unproductive. When a radical Palestinian faction staged an unsuccessful attack along the Israeli coast near Tel Aviv in May 1990, Baker was irate at Arafat’s refusal to condemn the raid, or even distance himself from the Palestinian group that was responsible. Shortly thereafter, Bush and Baker suspended the dialogue indefinitely. Baker told my colleague Aaron Miller, “If I had another life, I’d want to be a Middle East specialist just like you, because it would mean guaranteed permanent employment.” Beneath the sarcasm, Baker’s lack of interest in getting dragged into interminable problems was unambiguous. He hated being “diddled,” and the Middle East seemed overrun with diddlers.
After the Gulf War in the spring of 1991, however, Baker saw an opening. The defeat of Saddam Hussein boosted Arab moderates. Mubarak felt more secure. The Saudis and the Gulf Arabs owed the Bush administration their survival. Assad was sobered by the steep decline of his Soviet patrons, and impressed by American military and diplomatic prowess. A connoisseur of power, he understood that the ground was shifting in the region. King Hussein of Jordan was anxious to get back in good graces with Bush and Baker after staying aloof from the Desert Storm coalition. Arafat’s sympathy for Saddam left him in similarly difficult circumstances, cut off from Arab financial support and worried that he was losing touch with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who were engaged in a fitful uprising against Israeli occupation. His leverage was decreasing too.
Yitzhak Shamir was uneasy about the outcome of the war. On the one hand, Saddam’s ability to threaten Israel had been dealt a massive blow. On the other, however, Shamir was anxious about where newfound ties with key Arab states might take the U.S. administration. Gorbachev was increasingly consumed with the collapsing Soviet Union, and had little alternative to cooperating with Washington on the Middle East, so long as Soviet pride of place was preserved. All of this added up to a moment of diplomatic opportunity that was exceedingly rare in the Middle East. As Dennis Ross argued to Baker, “We’ve just seen an earthquake. We have to move before the earth resettles, because it will, and it never takes long.”
There was also an element of pride and competitiveness in Baker’s thinking. Crucial as his role had been in constructing the Desert Storm coalition, the war was naturally a moment for presidential leadership. President Bush was center stage, the full might of the American military beside him. Now Baker had before him a chance to win the peace, to show what American diplomacy could accomplish in the wake of sweeping military successes. For the consummate problem-solver, what bigger challenge was there than Arab-Israeli peace?
Baker was not especially interested in the arcane details of Arab-Israeli issues, or the history and culture of the region. He had an enormously retentive mind for what he needed to know to navigate a negotiation and bridge differences, and a gift for managing complicated personalities. He lowballed public expectations, always convinced that it was better to underpromise and overdeliver. His refrain to those of us immersed in his peacemaking effort was that we had to “crawl before we walk, and walk before we run.” Baker’s near-term goal was not to secure a comprehensive peace agreement, but rather to use the leverage that the United States had, before it evaporated, and set in motion a process that would for the first time bring the Israelis and all the Arab parties into direct negotiations with one another, within a framework that might sustain the process and perhaps even eventually produce substantive accords.
He had in mind a two-track approach, tilted more to the Israeli insistence on separate bilateral talks with each of their Arab adversaries than the historic Arab argument for an international conference that could impose binding outcomes on the parties. In a nod to Arab and international opinion, the process would start with a meeting of all the parties, which would simply launch talks rather than prescribe their end states. Then there would be a set of individual negotiations: Syrian-Israeli, Lebanese-Israeli, and talks between Israel and a delegation of Jordanians and Palestinians not formally connected to the PLO. The conference would launch a second track, engaging all the parties as well as key global players on wider regional challenges like water, environment, and economic development. Consistent with discussions with Gorbachev in the run-up to the war, the Soviets would nominally co-sponsor the initial conference and the ensuing process.
Given his earlier frustrations with Shamir, Baker realized that the key was to create a structure so attuned to Israeli concerns that the prime minister couldn’t back out. Baker had to persuade the Syrians to temper their animosity toward Israel, and cajole the Palestinians into swallowing hard and accepting conditions for their participation that they resented deeply.
Baker set out on the first of his post–Gulf War trips just after President Bush’s triumphal address to a joint session of Congress on the evening of March 6. His broad aim was to outline his concept for reviving Arab-Israeli negotiations, and his tactical goal was to harvest the debt owed the United States for the defeat of Saddam, especially by the Gulf Arabs, and show Shamir that the Arabs were prepared to engage him directly.
The scene when we landed in Kuwait City on the early afternoon of March 9 was unforgettable. The airport’s main terminal was pockmarked by shellfire, with broken glass and rubble everywhere. When we helicoptered north to see some of the damage done by the Iraqis in their scorched-earth withdrawal, the sky turned black. Saddam’s forces had set fire to five hundred Kuwaiti oil wells, and billowing dark smoke was everywhere, the air thick with soot and flames shooting upward across the apocalyptic horizon.
The rest of the trip was modestly encouraging. In Cairo, Hosni Mubarak was exuberant about the way in which Bush and the coalition had humbled Saddam. “Jim,” he boomed across his spacious office, “I don’t think Shamir will change, but this is your best chance.” Shamir himself was cautious, especially about the proposed opening conference, and insistent that Palestinian representatives had to be part of a joint delegation with Jordan and unconnected to the PLO. The secretary had a useful introductory discussion with a group of ten Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, led by Feisal Husseini, a well-respected member of a prominent East Jerusalem family, and Hanan Ashrawi, a Ramallah academic whose emergence as a secular, nonviolent female leader fluent in the language of the street as well as diplomacy made a strong impression. Baker stopped in Damascus to see Assad again, and found him wary but ready to engage. In Moscow, the Soviets told the secretary that they were quite interested in co-sponsorship of the process; Baker made clear in return that Moscow would need to first restore full diplomatic relations with Israel.
That first trip demonstrated Baker’s skill in managing both regional personalities and his own personnel. On the latter, he relied on a tight Middle East team who accompanied him throughout his 1991 shuttle diplomacy. Dennis Ross was Baker’s senior advisor, and then there were three more junior aides: Dan Kurtzer, Aaron Miller, and me. We churned out massive quantities of talking points for Baker’s meetings, strategy papers for his shuttles, public statements, and cables. It was Margaret Tutwiler who coined the term “food processors” to describe our endless churn. It probably didn’t do much for our street credibility as hard-nosed diplomats when the phrase made it into a Washington Post profile of our work later that fall, but it certainly captured the grinding rhythm of serious diplomatic enterprises.
Baker understood from the outset that building personal trust with a complicated and often intractable set of regional players would be critical. The three most crucial to the effort were Shamir, Assad, and the Palestinians. In constructing a process largely to the Israeli prime minister’s specifications, Baker worked assiduously to win the confidence of the ever-suspicious Shamir. They were an unlikely pair—the smooth, artful Texas patrician whittling away methodically at the reservations of the hardline Israeli political veteran, whose soft-spoken demeanor belied a steely resistance to compromise and an abiding mistrust of anyone who might try to lure him down that path. But they developed a genuine, if sometimes grudging, mutual respect, without which the Madrid Peace Conference would never have happened.
Delivering Hafez al-Assad and Palestinian representatives to the negotiating table, on terms that Shamir could stomach, was the key to cutting off his diplomatic routes of escape. Baker spent dozens of hours with Assad in 1991. Their meetings were tests of stamina, will, and ingenuity, with Assad filibustering and probing constantly for weaknesses in Baker’s arguments or assurances. Alternately tough and empathetic, sometimes raising his voice in exasperation or threatening to abandon his peacemaking effort, Baker clearly established himself in Assad’s eyes as a formidable and worthy negotiating partner. Assad regularly stretched Baker’s patience to the breaking point, but came to trust the secretary’s commitment and pragmatic disposition.
The same proved true of the Palestinians with whom Baker wrestled over those eight roller-coaster months. Husseini, Ashrawi, and their colleagues were caught in a vise. Their options tightly limited by Israeli occupation, they were further constrained by their political subordination to the PLO leadership in Tunisia, popular suspicions in the West Bank and Gaza, and the difficult parameters that Baker insisted upon for Palestinian representation in negotiations. They had no easy choices, but they came to trust Baker enough to take the chance that once engaged in direct negotiations, even if nominally part of a joint delegation with the Jordanians, they could translate their weak hand into tangible progress toward self-determination.
With Shamir, Assad, and the Palestinians, Baker was ecumenical in his candor. In one of the many pungent Texas expressions that he introduced into the Middle East political lexicon, he threatened to “leave a dead cat on the doorstep” of any party that balked at the diplomatic possibility he was offering. As the months wore on, their worries about being blamed by Baker for failure grew, even as their suspicions about one another remained intense. None of them were eager to call his bluff.
Baker made two more trips to the region in April. The first included a stop along the Turkish border with Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of Kurdish refugees were camped, fleeing Saddam’s postwar repression and sorely in need of assistance and protection. That sea of humanity made a powerful impression on all of us, and Baker reinforced the inclination of President Bush to do more to help. The scenes from his April talks with the Arabs and Israelis on that trip were less spectacular, but similarly worrisome. Shamir still took issue with any form of United Nations participation in the peace conference that Baker was proposing, and questioned whether UN Security Council Resolution 242, which had shortly after the 1967 war set out the basic formula of land for peace, should be the basis for negotiations. Assad, on the other hand, insisted on a clear UN role to provide “international legitimacy,” a continuing role for the conference as the two tracks of negotiations unfolded, and a provision that the U.S. and Soviet co-sponsors would be expected to “guarantee” outcomes.
The Palestinians still maintained that they should be able to determine their own representatives, balking at Baker’s position that they had to be part of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, and not include members either formally affiliated with the PLO or resident in East Jerusalem. Although King Hussein, anxious to get back in American good graces, pledged full Jordanian support for the process, and Mubarak remained a stalwart backer, the Saudis had begun to slide back into their familiar risk-averse, pre–Desert Storm position, and dragged their feet on whether they’d participate in the conference and the follow-on multilateral track negotiations. Baker left his last set of discussions, which included both the nine-hour “bladder diplomacy” episode with Assad and an equally frustrating stop in Jerusalem, increasingly concerned about whether the process would ever get off the ground.
In several more trips in late spring and summer, Baker steadily chipped away at the remaining resistance. There were predictable fits and starts in trying to persuade the Gulf Arabs to deliver on their commitments. When the Saudis pulled up short of making an expected announcement of their participation at one point, Baker pounded his hand on his desk and said in exasperation, “Those guys could fuck up a two-car funeral.”
Slowly but surely, the parties were coming around. In May, the Saudis agreed to attend the conference, an historic first. We found a recipe for the conference structure that Shamir and Assad both reluctantly accepted, with a UN observer role. Assad was impressed by Baker’s offer of a U.S. security guarantee of whatever Israeli-Syrian border was negotiated, complete with the possibility of American forces on the Golan Heights. Assad indicated formally in a letter to Bush in July that he would participate. Finally, the Palestinians agreed to attend under the terms that Baker had outlined.
Baker returned to the region for an eighth time in October. He had scheduled a meeting in Jerusalem on the afternoon of October 18 with the new Soviet foreign minister, Boris Pankin, after which we planned to issue the invitations to the peace conference. The parties were still nervous and important details still unresolved. The Palestinians, in particular, were having difficulty producing the list of fourteen names for their part of the joint delegation that they had promised, so that Baker could make sure they met the agreed criteria.
Baker met with Husseini, Ashrawi, and several of their colleagues at the very un–Middle Eastern hour of 7:45 that morning at the old U.S. Consulate General facility on Nablus Road in East Jerusalem. He was unhappy about the last-minute snag, and tired of the wrangling. Baker understood how hard it was for the Palestinians to navigate their own leadership in Tunis, and he put on a masterful performance that morning. He implored Husseini and Ashrawi to pull themselves together for one final push across the goal line. He was direct about the choice the Palestinians faced. The only way they could regain control over the West Bank and Gaza was through negotiations with the Israelis, and if the deck was stacked against them in procedural terms, that was still the best they could hope for. Arafat had made a major mistake taking sides with Saddam, and this was the price. The United States was not going to deliver an outcome for the Palestinians; they’d have to work hard through negotiations, but the Bush administration would ensure a fair process. As he gathered the Palestinian delegation around him at the end of the meeting, he gave them one final pep talk. “Lots of people like to say that you never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” Baker said. “Show them that they’re wrong.”
By midafternoon, however, the Palestinians were still struggling. It was clear that they weren’t going to give Baker any more than seven names that day, and it was uncertain that they could agree on the remaining seven. The dead cat was not far from their doorstep.
The mood in Baker’s suite at the King David Hotel was tense. Foreign Minister Pankin sat forlornly at one end of the living room, with little to say or do but wait for Baker to make his next move. Tired and disappointed, Baker said he was inclined to postpone the conference. Margaret Tutwiler started preparing a short statement to inform the horde of reporters gathered on the first floor of the hotel.
Baker had always encouraged Dan, Aaron, and me to speak up, especially when we had dissenting views. The three of us quickly huddled in Baker’s cramped walk-in closet, and decided to make a case to move ahead with the invitation. With Pankin and his aides looking on passively, every bit the disoriented representatives of a fallen superpower, Dan laid out our concerns to Baker. It was true that there was no guarantee that the Palestinians would produce the required names, and there was a real risk if a premature invitation led to embarrassment. On the other hand, there was at least as big a risk that the momentum Baker had built in recent months would stall. The other parties were perfectly capable of throwing more wrenches into the works, and the whole effort could collapse. Aaron and I seconded Dan’s recommendation that we take the plunge. Baker listened carefully, and said he wanted to think about it for a few minutes. He consulted with Pankin, as much for the sake of form as anything else, and then opted to issue the invitation. The Palestinians soon got their act together and came up with the remaining names.
The Madrid Peace Conference opened less than two weeks later, on the morning of October 30. There was no shortage of drama in the air; I still recall how angry Baker looked when Syrian foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa, in a move that was gratuitously nasty even by the standards of the Assad regime, paused in a rebuttal to hold up a 1947 British Mandate wanted poster of Shamir, who had fought for Israel’s independence as a member of the notorious Stern Gang. Usually the picture of self-control, Baker looked at that moment as if he wanted to throw his gavel across the room at Sharaa.
There were a number of other fits and starts over the next few days, but eventually each of the bilateral negotiations got under way, and the multilateral talks with a wider group of regional and international players started not long thereafter. Through all the ups and downs, we never lost sight of just how extraordinary it was to gather all these players and personalities and get them to agree to what each had for so long insisted was nonnegotiable.
The election of Yitzhak Rabin and a Labor government in Israel the following June led to the secret Oslo talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, a direct outgrowth of what Baker had launched in Madrid. I suspect Baker could have brokered a Syrian-Israeli agreement, had there been a second Bush 41 term, and perhaps a permanent-status Israeli-Palestinian deal. His skills, weight within the administration, relationships with all the key players in the region, and proven ability to deliver could not be easily replicated. He seemed like the right peacemaker at the right time.
THE REST OF the world was hardly quiescent while the Middle East absorbed so much American diplomatic energy. With the Cold War over, and the old bipolar international order crumbling, all sorts of new centrifugal forces were at work. As we put it in a Policy Planning Staff memo to Baker in the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union’s “external empire” had disintegrated in 1989, and now its “internal empire” was beginning to as well.
The Soviet Union proved far more brittle than many of us had assumed. On August 19, 1991, a motley group of Soviet conservatives staged a putsch against Gorbachev, putting him under house arrest in Crimea. The Soviet vice president, Gennady Yanayev, appeared on state television and with hands trembling and voice unsteady declared that a new committee of which he was the deeply unconvincing head had taken charge of the country. Boris Yeltsin, the recently elected president of the Russian Federation, courageously faced down the coup plotters in Moscow, with the backing of significant elements of the Soviet military. As the coup attempt unfolded, Baker was on vacation in Wyoming, and Dennis and his family were in New Hampshire. Back in Washington, my colleagues and I tried to understand what had happened, and where it might lead. Andrew Carpendale and John Hannah drafted two papers for Baker, the first analyzing the coup and its implications, and the second laying out a framework for dealing with the likely fragmentation of the Soviet Union.
It was clear that Gorbachev, despite surviving the coup, was a desperately weakened leader. Yeltsin was the man of the hour. The failed putsch had stripped bare the fecklessness of the conservative opposition, opening the way for radical democratic and market reform and a range of independence movements. Our memo suggested that the only way Gorbachev could stay afloat politically was to become the champion of truly ambitious structural reform, and the only way the Soviet center could hold the union together was as the driver of meaningful political and economic change, in a much more loosely federated system. Both, we predicted, were quite unlikely.
The more prescriptive paper laid out a set of principles to help govern American policy toward the issue of a potential breakup of the Soviet Union, similar to what we had provided Baker on German reunification in 1990. On their face, the five principles we suggested were not controversial: peaceful self-determination; respect for existing borders without unilateral modifications; respect for democracy and rule of law; respect for human rights, especially minority rights; and adherence to international law and obligations. Nevertheless, as we had found on German reunification, clear policy guidelines were critical to shape our approach and the tactical choices before us.
Baker outlined the five principles at a White House press briefing in early September, and then traveled to Moscow to get a firsthand sense of the situation. The makeshift barricades around the Russian White House were still in place. Baker saw both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who each professed to be optimistic about their political futures. The secretary came away skeptical that Gorbachev could survive politically, and persuaded that the challenge for the Bush administration was to help make the crash of the Soviet Union as bloodless as possible.
By late December, the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. After a poignant visit with Baker in Moscow and a last telephone call as leader of the Soviet Union with President Bush, Gorbachev resigned on December 25 and his country was no more. I went again with Baker to Moscow in January for the opening of the Middle East multilateral talks. That was a surreal experience, with the Russian tricolor now flying over the Kremlin, and Yeltsin’s new, independent Russian government effectively inheriting the role of co-sponsor.
In February, I joined Baker’s trip to a number of the other newly independent former Soviet states. We landed in a Yerevan that was almost totally dark as night fell, the Armenian power system failing and electricity shortages the norm. Baku was nearly as dismal, with rusting gas and oil pipes littering the roadside on the way in from the bedraggled airport. The Central Asian states were brighter, but just as poor. President Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan whipped out a small laminated card containing Baker’s “five principles” for dealing with the process of post-Soviet independence, which he said he always kept in his coat pocket. Baker enjoyed Karimov’s hospitality in Tashkent and especially in exotic Samarkand. On the plane afterward, however, he expressed his lack of faith in Karimov’s democratic conversion, noting that “that guy pays about as much attention to those principles as I do to Uzbek music.”
At Baker’s urging, the Bush administration tried to be systematic about supporting the new independent states. The United States rapidly established embassies in each capital and set up substantial programs of humanitarian assistance, market economic advice, and defense conversion. It also launched the Nunn-Lugar program, to help ensure the safety and security of Soviet nuclear weapons, which were now spread at least temporarily across four sovereign states.
Other troubles were always bubbling up. In the latter part of the Bush administration, Yugoslavia began to splinter. Serbian forces laid siege to Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital, in the spring of 1992, and concerns mounted in European capitals as well as in Washington. In June, based on a strategy memo that Dennis and Andrew Carpendale had helped put together, the secretary recommended to the White House a robust plan to build diplomatic and economic pressure on the Serbs, and potentially even to deploy a multilateral force to break the siege and ensure that relief supplies got through. Brent Scowcroft supported Baker. Cheney and Powell were less enthusiastic. The Serbs momentarily backed down before the U.S. initiative got off the ground, and humanitarian supplies flowed into Sarajevo. The worst, however, was yet to come. The Bush administration, with a presidential reelection campaign in full swing and poll numbers dropping from their post–Desert Storm peak, was not eager to take risks in the Balkans, and content to let the Europeans take the lead. Its failure to act more forcefully only made the choices of the next administration more complicated.
In late summer, Baker moved to the White House to lead the president’s floundering campaign and serve as chief of staff. Dennis went with Baker. Larry Eagleburger became acting secretary of state, and asked me to serve as acting director of Policy Planning. Sitting in George Kennan’s old seat and still only thirty-six, I felt an uneasy pride.
One of our main preoccupations over the next six months was trying to think through the contours of an American strategy for managing post–Cold War order. We had begun this effort with a paper for Baker in late April 1992, entitled a little too expectantly, “Foreign Policy in the Second Bush Administration: An Overview.”11 In it, we cited the accomplishments of Bush’s team, noting, “You and the President have much to be proud of in foreign policy. The end of the Cold War, a united Germany in NATO, peace in Central America, Desert Storm, and the first negotiations between Israel and all its Arab neighbors in forty-three years are singular achievements. But they amount to an unfinished agenda. Historians will ultimately judge you by how well you use the second term to translate those first-term successes into a coherent and enduring legacy. Above all, you will be judged by how well you have handled the two main consequences of the Cold War: the transformation of the former Soviet empire, and the victorious though fraying alliance of the U.S., Europe and Japan.”
The memo emphasized that the starting point for a successful strategy had to include an updated set of assumptions about the international landscape beyond the Cold War. With no global security rival to counterbalance, we were left with an increasingly regional security agenda. “We have a long-term stake in stability in at least three key regions—Europe, East Asia and the Persian Gulf,” I argued. “The end of the Cold War and the defeat of Iraq remove the immediate threat of a hostile power dominating one of those regions. What we face instead is the challenge of providing reassurance in a period of uncertainty, marked particularly by geopolitical upheaval and ethnic rivalry in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, ambiguity about the post–Cold War military roles of Germany and Japan, and the unclear path of post-revolutionary Iran.” I stressed the crucial significance of strengthening our international economic competitiveness as the foundation of our foreign policy.
Another assumption was that “the system of nation-states that developed during the Cold War, and the elites who governed those states, are caught in a swirl of both centralizing and decentralizing forces. The result is not the obsolescence of the nation-state, which still remains the central actor in international relations, but rather the transformation of the particular system of nation-states that we’ve grown accustomed to over the last half-century.” I continued that “from the disintegrated Soviet empire to the Balkans, to much of Africa and the Middle East, what is happening is that traditional elites who have either excluded significant national or ethnic groups from power or failed to deliver political or economic goods are under attack….The consequences of this political proliferation, and the crisis of legitimacy at its core, are uncertain ones for the U.S. On the one hand, there are enormous possibilities for nurturing democratic values and institutions, creating an international environment that could become more benign than ever for Americans. On the other hand, however, the search for legitimacy and national self-expression will often be a violent process—and it may lead to answers that meet local tests of legitimacy that aren’t very democratic, like conservative Islamic regimes or nationalist authoritarian ones.”
Defining our new leadership role would not be easy. America’s powerful position, I wrote, did not “imply American dominance of a unipolar world. Power, especially economic power, is too diffuse for so simple a construct. We need to be mindful of the dangers of hubris and the deep suspicions of many governments…about American unilateralism.” At the same time, I pointed out that “the reality remains that the United States, at least for the transitional period in history following the Cold War, occupies a unique position at the intersection of a diverse international system, remaining both a critical balancer in security sub-systems from Europe to Asia, and the only major player with a foot in each of three key economic sub-systems (the Americas, Europe and Asia). In short, while multilateralism may be one of the hallmarks of a post–Cold War order, it will have to be shaped largely by American leadership.”
In November, Bill Clinton defeated Bush, whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by mounting popular appetite for change and a thirst for post–Cold War domestic renewal. As part of the transition process, we crystallized our views in a paper Eagleburger shared with incoming secretary of state Warren Christopher in January 1993. It was entitled “Parting Thoughts: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Years Ahead.”12 We had refined our thinking quite a bit from the earlier drafts—and the notion of describing an agenda for a second Bush term was obviously long buried. Much of the analysis of the international environment was similar to what we had laid out before, but we highlighted both the advent of new transnational threats and the challenge of building domestic support for active American leadership. “A variety of new transnational threats has appeared,” I wrote, “particularly environmental degradation, drugs and the spread of deadly diseases like AIDS. Such dangers demand collective action rather than purely national responses. They also require an aggressive, new international scientific agenda, in which American leadership will be critical.”
The thrust of our paper was careful and realistic. We tried to take into account likely domestic constraints. We were mindful of traditional security risks and the danger of regional hegemons emerging. We also saw a shifting global landscape, where security had to be defined in broader terms and new threats had to be considered. We stressed the importance of leading by example and building coalitions of countries around our central role. We were not persuaded that the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War meant that the United States could take a detached view of the world, but we were also careful in our recognition of the perils of overreach and failing to connect ends to means. Ours was a strategy that accepted limits, but also reflected confidence in the capacity of the United States to at least manage problems, if not solve them. It was very much the worldview of Jim Baker, and many of the lessons we tried to articulate haven’t lost their relevance today, more than a quarter century later.