Former Secretary of State James Baker had a bad week. Perhaps it’s the fact that any comparison between Baker’s Middle East peace strategy and that of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo show just how vacuous were Baker’s assumptions.
The fall of the Soviet Union and the 100-hour U.S. victory over Iraq in Operation Desert Storm’s ground war presented an opportunity to change the dynamics of the Middle East. At the 1991 Madrid Conference, Baker succeeded in bringing together delegations from Israel, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt together in the same room, as well as the Palestine Liberation Organization, which attended as part of the Jordanian team.
As a photo-op, it was a breakthrough. In terms of Middle East peace, it was like running a football down the field for 99 yards, only to then fumble on the one-yard line. Baker’s shuttle diplomacy, and that of former Secretary of State Warren Christopher after him, empowered autocrats, offered the Palestine Liberation Organization an effective veto, and lead to a marked increase of terrorism and, for a quarter century afterwards, a deficit of peace.
True, Jordan signed a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, but that had been a longtime in the works and was more the result of decades of behind-the-scenes negotiations between Jordan’s King Hussein and successive Israeli leaders.
Contrast that with Pompeo, who has achieved more in four months than his predecessors had in four decades. Put another way, when Pompeo became secretary, Israel had relations with Egypt and Jordan. As Pompeo leaves, Israel now has ties to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.
Baker did not disappear from diplomacy at the end of the George H.W. Bush administration. He got a second wind in 1997 as United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s personal envoy for the Western Sahara. However, he fumbled here, too.
First, some background: The root of the Western Sahara conflict lies in the region’s post-colonial status. Morocco has long claimed the Sahara as its own (it has history on its side), but the Polisario Front, a Cold War relic long reliant on Algerian military and Cuban patronage, claimed the region as its own and declared the self-styled Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
Between 1975 and 1991, Morocco fought a war against the Algerian-backed Polisario, but in 1991, the U.N. brokered a ceasefire, which was supposed to be followed by a referendum to determine the Western Sahara’s status. Almost 30 years on, this referendum did not happen largely because the Polisario and its Algerian backers inflated refugee totals and sought to register Algerians, Mauritanians, and others who had never lived in the region.
Baker sought to break the impasse in 2000 with a framework agreement, which would ultimately grant the Western Sahara autonomy within Morocco. Morocco accepted that agreement and has now implemented it, but Baker suddenly reversed course and sought an imposed solution more favorable to the Polisario for reasons that he never fully explained (Moroccans suspect family business dealings with Algeria catalyzed Baker’s about-face). Regardless, the U.N. Security Council rejected Baker’s subsequent proposals, and he ultimately resigned.
Baker, Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe, and former national security adviser John Bolton (for whom Baker has been a mentor) have all been subsequently partisan toward the Polisario’s claims to the Sahara. It’s a curious alliance, given the Polisario Front’s Marxism and Algeria’s general antagonism toward the United States. Each has condemned the recent U.S.-brokered normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, which confirmed Moroccan suzerainty over the Western Sahara.
Baker’s essay, however, is truly bizarre and ultimately accelerates the tarnishing of his image as history and hindsight show his Middle East judgments to be wrong and counterproductive. To undermine an Arab-Israel peace breakthrough because “it threatens to complicate our relations with Algeria, an important strategic partner,” causes almost everyone outside Algiers to scratch his head in wonder. To label Algeria a strategic partner in North Africa is akin to calling Cuba a strategic partner in the Caribbean.
Baker gets history wrong when he says that Morocco took over the Western Sahara by force. Put aside the fact that the region was Moroccan until the Spanish seized it in a colonial scramble. The 1975 Green March, in which Moroccans returned to the area, was non-violent and involved thousands of Moroccans returning to the region on foot. Indeed, it was this action that compelled the Spaniards to leave. Many Sahrawis also sought to return, but the Polisario refused to allow them and their families to depart the Algerian refugee camps in which they remain as both the Algerian military and Polisario profit from their presence.
Given how Morocco is America’s top counterterrorism ally in the region, Baker also flips reality on its head when he states, “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and other groups could exploit the growing tensions in the region,” while the Polisario Front has rented its smuggling network to the al Qaeda affiliate. His entire article reads like the North African equivalent of the elder Bush’s “Chicken Kiev” speech.
Baker has invested decades in government service. He may see himself as a master statesman, but he appears unwilling to consider that his failures now have less to do with American adversaries and more to do with Baker’s own stubborn refusal to question his own beliefs. In post-retirement judgment, he has become a doppelganger of Jimmy Carter, ready to embrace dictatorships and throw America under the bus.
Baker’s false assumptions in the Middle East diplomacy hampered, rather than advanced, peace, and his misreading of Algeria, Morocco, and the Polisario Front threaten to do the same across North Africa and the Sahel.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
