Secretary of State James Baker Discusses the Collapse of the Soviet Union (1995)

parents who will face license suspension. Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue, David Gergen, editor at large of U.S. News and World Report, engages James Baker, former Secretary of State and the Bush administration, who has just published his memoirs, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989-1992. They are also former colleagues having worked together in both the Ford and Reagan administrations. - You've chosen to write a book actually about the last 43 months, really, of your tenure in government, about your time as Secretary of State. You said you found that personally the most satisfying of all of your assignments. Why? - Well, I wrote a book about my time as Secretary of State because the world changed during that 43 months. The world as I had known it for my entire adult life changed. There were so many historic things that happened with the collapse of communism, the fall of the Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and NATO,

Mideast peace, the Persian Gulf War, the war in Panama. I could never have written a book, I don't think it would have been of any reasonable length, about the 12 years in government through the campaigns and the White House and the Treasury and so forth. - The linchpin seemed to be the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Berlin Wall. That seemed to open up everything else. - The collapse of communism, the end of the East/West confrontation, and it did open up so many different possibilities. It created a whole lot of events and facts on the ground. As I say, the world changed. We were so used for 40 years to looking at U.S. foreign policy in the context of our confrontation with the Soviet Union, in the East/West context, in the context of containment as the paradigm for formulation and implementation of our foreign policy. - One of the major achievements that came out of that was the move from confrontation to cooperation with the Soviets and the Russians.

I was struck by how often you talked about Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister and the personal relationship... Was Shevardnadze a more important player in bringing the Soviets around than is generally understood on the outside? I think he was a more important player than is generally understood on the outside, although Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, who's now the Deputy Secretary of State, wrote a book that made the point that Shevardnadze was frequently seen to be pushing Gorbachev to take risks and take chances for peace and chances for change. You'll see in my book where Shevardnadze agreed to that initial joint statement with me the day after Iraq invaded Kuwait, when we stood together and condemned the Soviet client's state's invasion of Kuwait. He agreed to an arms embargo without ever clearing it with Gorbachev simply because he thought he was right. - As you look out to the future with Yeltsin, do you think he has a better prospect of succeeding where Gorbachev eventually collapsed? - Well, I don't know what you mean by succeeding. If you mean, is there a chance for reform to succeed in the Russian Federation? Yes, I think there is. And frankly, I think that

economic change is taking place there better than you might believe if you just read the newspapers. They still have a rather difficult political situation with a proliferation of parties. I think it was important for us to stay with Gorbachev as long as we did against criticism that we shouldn't have because we knew he was a reformer and we knew he was changing the Soviet Union in the direction that we wanted to see a change. And the fact of the matter is the Cold War ended peacefully. It didn't happen peacefully. By the same token, I think it's wrong to criticize President Clinton for hanging with Yeltsin because we know Yeltsin is a reformer. And after all, he is the first freely elected president that the Russian Federation has ever had. - It's obvious that the collapse of communism opened the door to the reunification of Germany, something which you play a major role in, opened the door to a new role and a new relationship with the Russians. What's less obvious is it opened the door also to what happened in

the Gulf. Now, you write, you think that Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait in part because he saw that as his moment of opportunity? - I think he did. I think he saw the end of the East/West confrontation as leaving one superpower in the world: the United States. I think that his desire for regional hegemony, he felt, would be thwarted if he waited. And that's why he moved when he did. And I write that. - Right. And he also apparently was going to go into Saudi Arabia.