Angry Planet - The Man Who Navigated the End of History

Episode Date: October 21, 2020

Remember back when the Berlin Wall fell and history ended? Back when we won the Cold War and America was embraced by allies old and new, becoming the world’s only superpower. The Gulf War was fought and seemingly won.Actually, maybe you don’t. It was the end of the 1980s, after all.George Bush - no, not that one - stood at the center of events, and inside that center stood James A. Baker III.To tell us about the man who ran Washington, and why he remains important, we welcome Peter Baker of the New York Times who wrote the book with his wife Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The couple’s book, coincidentally, is called The Man Who Ran Washington.Recorded 10/9/20Hey, remember the 1980s?Who was the man who ran Washington?Foreign policy as the presidential big leaguesThe nightmare of facing Jim Baker in an election“Baker was Bush”How to win the Iraq war only to lose it laterHow to navigate the end of historySibling rivalry between Bush and BakerAngry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. They don't have to worry about Congress for the most part. They don't have to worry about the courts for the most part. They have so much more freedom to act on the world stage. And people like Trump in particular love the, you know,

atmospherics and the pageantry and so forth of being out there. there. I mean, you know, he's bragging. I met the Queen of England. She loves me. And he loves, you know, the sort of the showmanship of stepping across the DMZ line and into North Korea to meet Kim Jong-un, even though it doesn't produce anything of actual substance. One day, all of the facts in about 30 years' time will be published. When genocide has been cut out in this country, almost with impunity, and when it is near to completion, is people talk about intervention. They will be met with fire, fury, and frankly, power,

the likes of which this world has never seen before. Welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Remember back when the Berlin Wall fell and history ended? Back when we won the Cold War and America was embraced by allies old and new, becoming the world's only superpower, The Gulf War was fought and seemingly won. Actually, maybe you don't.

It was the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s after all. George Bush, no, not that one, stood at the center of events, and inside that center stood James A. Baker the 3rd. To tell us about the man who ran Washington and why he remains important, we're welcoming Peter Baker of the New York Times, who wrote the book with his wife, Susan Glasser, of the New York, The couple's book, coincidentally, is called The Man Who Ran Washington. Thank you for joining us.

Any, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. All right, this is a big question that has to fit in a little space. But can you sum up who James Baker is and was? Yeah, it's a hard one because he was so many things. One of the things we wanted to do with this book is actually one of the reasons we want to write this book is because he had his hand in so many things from the end of the Watergate period to the end of the Cold War.

He ran five presidential campaigns for Republican presidents. He was Reagan's chief of staff, Treasury Secretary, and Secretary of State at the end of the Cold War. Imagine having basically Carl Rove and Henry Kissinger rolled into one, right? That's essentially Jim Baker. On domestic and foreign affairs, he had a fingerprint on almost every major thing that happened in Washington for a generation. So why did he want to become Secretary of State?

I mean, you mentioned he was chief of staff. He was Secretary of the Treasury. What was it about state that really grabbed him? Well, I think he had spent years doing politicking and domestic legislation, and he saw being Secretary of State as the validation of his desire to become a statesman, right? He was tired of being a fixer. He, Time Magazine in the 1988 campaign, put him on the cover along with Dukakis' main guy under the headline Battle of the Handlers, and he hated it.

He hated the idea that he was a handler. want to be anybody's offerative. He wanted to be a statesman. And the best way to be a statesman in this country, of course, is to be Secretary of State. So we saw that as a challenge and a worthy goal. And it was the one thing he wanted, I think, more than anything. What did he know about foreign policy at that point? Well, I mean, on the one and nothing, right, in the sense that he had not prepared for this. He wasn't, like, you know, educated in some sort of geopolitical history and all that. He was not Kisagerian in the sense that he would not sit down with you and discuss the Treaty of Westphalia and the history of the nation state. But on their hand, just by being White House Chief of Staff

and Treasury Secretary, he had some encounters, obviously, with foreign relations. Even as Treasury Secretary, he had to negotiate with other central bankers and finance ministers around the world about currencies and other financial issues. So he had begun to get a taste of it. But what he brought to the table, if not necessarily it was a great knowledge of the world or foreign languages or anything like that. He did bring a powerful relationship with the President of the United States, which no Secretary of State has had to that degree. And secondly, I think an instinct for how to sit down with people and negotiate, how to compromise, how to get things done. And so he took the skill set that it worked for him on a domestic level to the international stage.

One thing that you talk about in the book, which is frankly hard to imagine this week. this month this year is that even though he ran a tough campaign tough i think may not even describe it he could talk to democrats right i mean he actually made deals with democrats he did and that was the thing right he ruthless knife fighter during election years ask michael duccas or al gore if they think the jim baker some sort of a softy they wouldn't tell you that he was obviously but when the elections were over, he wanted to do something. He wanted to use the election to to accomplish something. And that's a difference between today. I think you're right. Like in that era, at least for Baker, elections were a means to get to the place when you can govern. Today,

the governing is about setting up the next election rather than getting stuff done. It's hard to imagine in a Baker era that he wouldn't have found a way to get a COVID relief bill without waiting six months. Everybody out there suffering and jobless and sick. It just, it would have been unthinkable to him not to cut a deal faster and more, more efficiently. It might not have been what everybody wanted, but it would have been done. And his first act of separate state, I think, goes to your point. For the last decade, the Reagan administration and the country had been torn apart by the contra war in Nicaragua. And it had been debilitating.

Baker has seen it, basically nearly destroy the Reagan administration because of the Iron Contra scandal. And he wanted it off the table. He was not a true believer. a, you know, I mean, he was, you know, obviously anti-communist like everybody in that sense, but he was not a crusader. He didn't see that as being a useful exercise or adventure. And he sits down with Jim Wright, who's a Democratic Speaker of the House, and basically cuts a deal. Let's make this go away. Let's have elections in Nicaragua. We will support whoever wins, even if it's Ortega, who is the communist that they had been fighting for so long, as long as they're free and fair.

and he enlist Jimmy Carter, of all people, to go there and to make sure that happens. By chance, Ortega actually loses. So it was a two-for-win for Baker. But broadly speaking, he just wanted this to go away. He wanted the Democrats and Republicans to come together and make this issue we should divide them for so long, go away. Can you tell us a little bit about what Americans for a policy looked like overall? Was there a defining foreign policy when Baker came to office?

Well, I don't think there would be like a textbook, you know, history class definition of, you know, I'm not an academic. I mean, I can't imagine that there's sort of a construct that it necessarily easily falls into other than basic transactionalism. I mean, you know, Baker was a transactionalist. He was a pragmatist, famously so. He wasn't internationalist. He believed in alliances. I mean, that is a significant different than today. He believed in NATO. He believed in going to the UN. He believed in negotiating. He believed in coalitions. He puts together the coalition for the Iraq War. And not only does he get our obvious allies to participate,

but he gets the Arabs to participate. The Syrians participate in the war against Iraq. Imagine that today. Plus, then he goes around the world to get our allies to help pay for it. They call the Tim Kup tour. And he got so many allies to trip in so much money toward the cost of the Gulf War that it may be the first war in American history where we almost turned a profit.

And, you know, his idea of international, National Affairs was what is possible here, what is doable, let's pursue that. George H.W. Bush is often credited with pulling together that coalition. Would you say that's true, or is it also just a function of how close Baker and Bush were? The Baker was Bush, right? For the purposes of foreign leaders, when he would land at a capital and he would get off that plane, they knew it was essentially the equivalent of the president of the United States, right? If Baker told them something was going to happen or if he took a position in the negotiating room,

it was what the president's position was. You were not going to find a difference. Baker told us again and again in the writing of this book, one of his favorite phrases is, you're never going to find any light between me and my president. Nobody's going to get between me and my president. And that was one of his superpowers, right? His relationship with Bush preceded political office.

It was not an alliance of convenience, right? Most Secretary of States are either political allies in the president or often even political rivals of a president, right? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had run against each other. Now, they formed a pretty decent partnership, but they were not personal friends before taking office. George Bush and Jim Baker met on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club back in the late 50s

and were friends for a dozen years before Baker even got involved in politics. Baker was not a political guy. It was Bush who brings him into politics. So by the time Baker is Secretary of State, these two friends who were so close, their families played together, their wives were friends. When Baker's first wife died,

George and Barbara Bush were the only members outside of the family, last members outside of the family, to see his first wife in the hospital before she passed. They are real close personal friends. So the credibility that bought him was a power on the international stage that almost no other Secretary of State could have. Imagine today where nobody thinks that the Secretary of State speaks for our current

president. And even, you know, even John Kerry basically was often seen. He was described by somebody in the White House as that character from the movie Gravity, you know, where he's sort of like off on a tether far away from the space station. You don't know really whether he's going to make it back or not. So that was the difference between Baker and almost every other modern Secretary of State. All right, Angry Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break. We will be right back. All right, Angry Planet listeners, we are. back. Did they ever clash? Were there disagreements? Sure. Yeah. Because we do describe the relationship as like sibling relationship. They are kind of like brothers. Bush is six years older.

There was, of course, naturally sibling rivalry, right? Those two things go hand in hand. There were moments when Bush resented the fact that people thought Baker was the real power behind the throne. He would say to him, hey, if you're so smart, why aren't you present? That's when Baker knew it's time to shut up, whatever he was saying. When Bush picks Quail as his running date in 1988, he doesn't tell Baker, he doesn't consult with Baker. He doesn't ask Baker's opinion. It's an act of rebellion against this idea that Baker, again, is this sort of prime minister

or deputy president or what have you. And there are moments that Baker looks at Bush and thinks, well, you know, thinks I could do that. And in fact, I could do that better. And I think he had some moments of resentment toward Bush as well. But that's within the family. Those are sibling frictions rather than, you know, the frictions of two people who don't actually like each other.

And with push came to shove, the national security team under Bush 41, which also included Brent Skowcroft, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, probably the most cohesive, functioning national security team we've seen in modern times. The Gulf War, well, you know, it's actually really hard to tell what the most momentous event was during their administration. You know, we talked about the Gulf War already, but in some ways, the Gulf War pales in comparison to the end of the Cold War, right? So were Bush and Baker surprised by how fast things ended and how things ended?

You might actually have to tell people a little bit about how things ended because we are talking about, I mean, it's crazy. A long time ago, yeah. No, actually, and I think these all are connected, too, right? So if you pull the other, say the four major moments of Baker's time and Secretary State of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that story is the changing geopolitical order of that time, right? The fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, permits Germany be reunified

and creates a new world order in which basically Russia and, um, um, America stand together against outliers like Iraq trying to challenge the system, as it were, and also provide the opening for a new dialogue between Israel and its neighbors. So all these things are related. But I think you're right that there's nothing more consequential than the end of the Cold War. For 40 years, we had been at the brink of midnight, as it were, where at any moment we could have fallen into a catastrophic, global ending, you know, a conflict. And to be able to put that behind us, to be able to. say that's over, we're no longer, you know, on the edge of a nuclear confrontation was huge.

It's really the biggest, I think, the biggest story on the international stage of our lifetime. Now, did Baker and Bush expect it? No. They came into office, particularly Bush, a little skeptical of Gorbachev, a little skeptical, thinking that maybe Reagan had gone a little soft at the end of his term, getting a little too friendly with Gorbachev and the reformers there. It took a little while, took him a few months until Bush and Baker kind of came around, to the idea that actually he should be supporting Gorbachev. He is a legitimate reformer. But once they

did, they were all in. And Baker formed his relationship with Edward Shavidnazzi, who was the Soviet foreign minister that was really critical to a peaceful end of the Cold War. Gorbachev's reforms and his desire to change the Soviet Union allow the Eastern European countries to go the wrong way. suddenly Czechoslovakia and Hungary and Poland and all of these countries, and particularly Eastern Germany, obviously, are no longer controlled entirely by Moscow. They overthrow leaders like Nikolai Chochescu, who was the longtime dictator of Romania, for those who don't remember him, it was a rather bloody and terrible end around Christmas time where he was shot.

And Baker and Bush, who don't create these forces of history, do try to figure out a way to harness these forces of history, right? They're not the instigators of the revolution. They didn't make the Soviet Union fall, but when it was falling, they were the ones who helped manage it and bring in for a peaceful end, which is not a small thing. I think we look back history times and we think, oh, it was inevitable that it would go that way. I don't think that was inevitable at all. That could have been a very different ending. It could have been violent. It could have been dangerous. It could have been, it could have led to all sorts of terrible consequences. And Baker and Bush figured out a way to manage that tumultuous time for a peaceful ending.

I was going to ask next. You mentioned briefly that Germany got reunited and that Bush and Baker had a lot to do with that. One thing that I think a lot of people who are listening to this, or people who were millennials, at least, Germany was divided after World War II into two distinct countries and there was a reason for that as a friend of mine said 30 years ago as Germany was being reunited

he said well two world wars I guess they bear watching it was something as the millennial on the show it was something that I didn't understand really until a college professor told me, it's like, look, you have to understand that when the country was reunified, there was something we thought would never happen, that we thought would

never be allowed to happen again. Yeah, absolutely right. The people who were the most resistant weren't just the Soviets. They were the British and the French, our friends. You know, Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister of Britain at the time. Francois Mitterrand was the president of France at the time. They didn't think it was a great idea to put Germany back together again, because, as you point out rightly, they had fought two devastating wars against Germany in the previous seven decades. So it was for Baker, the challenge of reunifying Germany wasn't just figuring out how to make it possible for the Soviets to go along with it. It wasn't even just figuring out how to make the Germans agree to among each other. It was also bringing our very skeptical allies in London and Paris.

Why do you think it was so important to bring Germany back together? Why do you think that Bush and Baker felt that it was a key thing to do? Well, I think it was, in effect, bringing Germany back together was declaring an end to both World War II and the Cold War, to say, okay, we are now going to move forward toward a more united, integrated Europe, right? The phrase that Bush used was, Europe, whole and free. And Europe, of course, had been divided, obviously during World War II, but for 40 years it had been divided by the Iron Curtain down the middle. And this is a chance to put that behind it, to bring Europe together. Europe that had been the cause of so many wars and so much instability in the world could be integrated in a way that made it a more productive and peaceful partner for the United States. In fact, Europe could be a little like the United States of America rather than these warring nation states.

Now, you know, it was important for them to anchor Europe, Germany in NATO, to anchor in the West, to have it be part of the alliance. And they felt that as long as it was part of the NATO alliance, Germany would not be a threat that Britain and France worry about, but that would be stabilizing for Europe. That's, of course, something that was very concerning the Soviets, the idea that Germany was somehow lost to them, East Germany was lost to them,

was against the grain, particularly for the conservatives in Moscow, who were already seeing things fall apart. But, yeah, I think that was. a huge thing. And Germany has turned out to be in the 30 years since then, and we just celebrated last weekend the 30th anniversary of their reunification, has turned out to be an important, powerful, and constructive player on the world scene, economically, politically, and culturally. I'm sorry for jumping around a little bit, but to me, as actually, as you said, so many of

these issues are intertwined. So I'm thinking about the Gulf War. Do you think that Baker felt that there was unfinished business with the fact that Saddam Hussein was left in power? And what did he think about Gulf War II? That's great questions. In fact, Baker was not a great advocate of the war. He obviously supported it, but he would have much preferred to find a diplomatic solution. He was uncomfortable with the use of force any longer than the next. So he was not one of those who thought they should go on to Baghdad.

And the truth is when the moment came in the Oval Office, nobody was. Even Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, thought they should stop. Because they had a mandate to free Kuwait. They didn't have a mandate for regime change in Baghdad. And Baker thought it would pull apart the coalition if they continued to go on to Baghdad to take out Saddam Hussein. That's not what the Syrians have signed up for. That's not what the Egyptians have signed up for. and he thought that that was splinter, the unity of the coalition, the unity of that coalition

was much more important than taking out Saddam. Now, they fooled themselves, I think, into thinking Saddam Hussein had been so weakened that he would fall on his own, that his own people would take him out. And in fact, there were uprisings by the Shiites and the Kurds in the days after America stopped its operations. And the Americans didn't do anything to help him. And Saddam Hussein crushed them. In fact, we made a terrible mistake in the ceasefire by a grievance. to allow Saddam Hussein to use his helicopters, which he had portrayed as a way of transporting people around the country, but instead turned out to be the tool of suppressing these uprisings, particularly in the South, by the Shiites, and there was quite bloody. So there was a real

consequence to that mistake. But no, Baker never regretted, I don't think, not going on to Baghdad. Now, he would tell you, for years afterwards, he would get the question, well, how come you guys didn't go on to Baghdad? And he would have to give his little spiel about why they didn't. Then, after the 2003 invasion by George W. Bush, and then the subsequent war that went so badly, he will tell you, I don't get that question anymore. Nobody ever asked him anymore, how come you didn't go on to Baghdad? Because the reasons why, obviously, were made eminently clear in the 2003 war, because you, it's the Colin Powell Pottery Barn rule. You break it, you own it. And suddenly, you've taken over a country so factionalized, and now you're in charge of it, well, it turned out to be exactly what

they feared. Baker wasn't a fan of the 2003 invasion. He wrote an outbed before George W. Bush invaded, sort of saying, whoa, hold off. Don't go so fast. He didn't break with the administration as overtly as Brent Skokroft did. His father's former National Security Advisor, but Baker later plays a role with the Iraq Study Group, which is a panel formed by Congress in 2006 to try to figure out how can we help resolve this war that's going so badly? And he tried to help George W. Bush pull back from that. That must have been actually really hard for him. I mean, as loyal as he'd been to George Bush's father, to George W. Bush's father, to actually be in any way on the other side. Do you think that was difficult? Is there a personal toll to it? I think it was difficult. I think it's a testament to

his particular skill set that he could take on that role and still be, maintain his relationship with George W. Bush, because he was seen, of course, as the father's man coming in to correct the mistakes of the son. And in fact, there's a whole, you know, if you go to Baker Institute in Houston, there's a whole wall full of political cartoons, editorial cartoons for the time. The originals that are signed and framed, he likes to collect them. All along the theme of, you know, here's dad's guy coming into school, baby president who doesn't know what he's doing. So he kind of, he thought those were all amusing

enough to save and put on his wall. But you obviously didn't want to offend George W. Bush either. In fact, when George W. Bush, after his presidency, came to visit the Baker Institute for, you know, one of his anniversaries, Baker asked his staff, now where is he going to walk when he comes through the Institute? He's going to walk through this quarter. Well, that's the quarter with all those cartoons. He thinks, okay, that's going to be not something I wanted to see. So he lines up people on the other side of the hallway so that when Bush comes through, he has to shake hands with everybody and hopefully not look behind him and see all the cartoons that are kind of insulting to him. But you're right. He managed it and stays friends with George W. Bush anyway. Even to this day,

they go hunting together and they have remained friends. I think this might be the last question. I have an esoterror. Oh, no. Then Matthew. Matthew, please. So there's a sense, I think, from people like Baker and I would say up until the current administration that for the executive branch, foreign policy is the big leagues, I think. You know, I think that, like, Nixon really thought that as president, that's kind of, you know, where you were going and what you were in charge of. Do you think that has changed recently? And how do you think that has affected the executive branch?

That's an interesting question. You're right. I think historically foreign affairs was seen by presidents, certainly, as the big stuff, right? The stuff where you make history. And domestic stuff was what you. you had to do in order to have power in order to play on the world stage. But you weren't going to be known in history books because you signed some budget deal or you, you know, you pass some sort of, you know, whatever legislation. So you're right. I think that's true historically. And today,

that's an interesting question. I think though, I think even Trump in some ways likes the foreign affairs, they don't have to worry about Congress for the most part. They don't have to worry about the courts for the most part. They have so much more freedom to act on the world stage. And people like Trump, in particular, love the, you know, atmospherics and the pageantry and so forth of being out there. I mean, you know, he's bragging. I met the queen of England. She loves me. And he loves, you know, the sort of the showmanship of stepping across the DMZ line and into North Korea to meet Kim Jong-un, even though it doesn't produce anything of actual substance. But you're right. I mean, today we're in an inward focus moment. There's not a lot of interest in more military adventurism,

after Afghanistan and Iraq. And I think that there's a sense by so many Americans that we need to fix things at home that has changed a political culture as well. Peter Baker, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun. That's all for this week, Angry Planet listeners. Oh, cat screaming in the background. Angry Planet is me. Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell, who's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show, please go to angryplanet.substack.com and subscribe there for near $9 a month. You get access to two, count them two bonus episodes every month. There's another one going out this week.

That's all about the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan should be going up tomorrow. And as always, like, subscribe, leave us a rating on iTunes. It does help other people find the show. We will be back next week with more conversations about conflict on an angry planet Stay safe until then.