Poor Jim Baker! - U.S. problems with China, Israel and Colombia - column

National Review, Nov 10, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Poor Jim Baker! The vicissitudes of foreign affairs are so overwhelming as to leave breathless critics with the sole alternative of complaining that President Bush and James Baker have no "strategy." That criticism can be made in a polemical courtroom, but we should look at some of the problems they are facing before plunking down a facile answer to all of them.

--There is China. China, celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its People's Revolution, lacking only people to celebrate it. Those who came close enough to Tiananmen Square to qualify for admission needed to be searched and identified. There they could ponder forty years, including the period during which a hundred flowers were supposed to bloom, for every one of which about ten thousand Chinese were killed. Then the Cultural Revolution, which was the greatest assault on culture up until Pol Pot decided to eliminate literacy from Cambodia. Followed by a general relaxation of controls that came to a sharp end last June when young Chinese began to take literally what they had thought of as encouragement to democratize their Revolution. The United States has simultaneously to paw the ground with legitimate indignation at the brutality of the June repression while studiously avoiding any geopolitical rupture of the kind that would accelerate the banns of Sino-Soviet affection. Not at all easy, not at all.

--The Israelis invented the word chutzpah and there ain't anybody in the world who can practice it the way they can. The sequence goes as follows: 1) Our secretary of state gives a speech telling the Israelis that they must really cut out planting fresh settlers in the West Bank, against the terms of the Camp David Accords. The United States then puts extra pressure on the Soviet Union to release Russian Jews who are anxious to leave. But once the Jews receive their visas, the great majority express a wish to settle down--not in Israel, but in the United States. Israel does not like this, because it needs a Jewish population to guard against being dysgenically overwhelmed by Arabs, who procreate with the speed of light. So . . . we contrive to reroute the Russian Jews to Israel, and Israel tells them to go settle in the West Bank, and then turns to the State Department and says: Please send us four hundred million dollars more to help build houses for the Russian Jews to settle in the West Bank. We can only assume that when Jim Baker heard that one he stomped out of his office and ordered--a hot dog.

--And then there is Colombia. Two weeks ago, President Bush tells all the world that in his war on drugs, Colombia will figure critically. After all, Colombia is the hotbed of the cocaine export trade, and Colombia has suffered most drastically from the effort to reduce, indeed to eliminate, that export. The man who would be president--and had a good chance of becoming president--was assassinated. The minister of justice finally, well, just plain gave up, after her family was threatened several times. There is, in much of metropolitan Colombia something like a de facto curfew, so militantly in control of the streets is the drug-merchant class. And last weekend the news came in that the Colombian population is--tiring of the fight. That there are politicians there, increasingly popular, who are saying: The hell with it. "Let's grow the stuff and ship it out and let the United States worry about Americans who want to poison themselves by paying for it. That's their concern, not ours. Ours is to do what we can to save our republic." What do Bush-Baker-Bennett say in reply to that?

--Now the Soviet Union seems to be coming apart. It can't feed its own population, or clothe it, or, for that matter, keep it sober. And then there is the centrifugal dynamism, growing, growing, to the point where little Latvia simply announces that it is going to go independent, which is something like, oh, Nantucket announcing that it is going to leave the Union. This, plus thousands upon thousands of East German refugees--and the East Germans are the spoiled men of the satellite empire--rushing through the hole in the Wall, via Hungary, to breathe freedom in West Germany. We can't stop them and won't, obviously; but the State Department does worry that the deterioration in Gorbachev's control of his own country could--well, could convulse Eastern Europe. And after that? What is our strategy then? If you have the answer to this, call Jim Baker, collect.