Baker Institute a Participant in Videoconference

Baker Institute a Participant in Videoconference

BY DANA DURBIN
Rice News Staff
Jan. 28, 1999

Rice University played a role in the Jan. 19 inauguration of the Council on Foreign Relation’s Peter G. Peterson Center for International Studies as James A. Baker, III, participated in a videoconference showcasing the state-of-the-art facility.

From Rice’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Baker took part in the event that linked him up with three other former secretaries of state located in three different cities to address the question, “How is the post cold war era different in problems and opportunities from the world you dealt with while secretary of state?”

Located at the Council on Foreign Relations headquarters in New York City, the new Peterson Center allowed the link-up between Baker in Houston; Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, in New York; George Shultz, secretary of state under President Reagan, in San Francisco; and Warren Christopher, secretary of state under President Clinton, in Los Angeles.

In his remarks, Baker, honorary director of the Baker Institute, said he was lucky to be secretary of state during the late 1980s and early ’90s when the transition from the cold war era to the post cold war era occurred.

The main difference between the cold war era and the world as we know it today, Baker explained, is the “absence of any single pervasive, all-powerful threat to the very existence of the United States of America.”

During the first two years of his term of secretary of state under President Bush, Baker said, “It was easy to determine what we were for and what we were against.” Whatever the Soviet Union was for, the United States was against, and whatever it was against, we were for, he said.

There was a paradigm of containment practiced in the United States at that time, Baker said, adding that there was a degree of certainty about the cold war.

But, he said, “I don’t think we for one minute should be nostalgic about the cold war.” It was a more dangerous era, he said.

Today, policy makers often struggle, Baker said, because the paradigm that called for the containment of a hostile foe and its ideologies no longer exists, making it harder to achieve a consensus behind foreign and domestic policy alike.

Also participating in the inauguration of the Peterson Center were Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, from Washington, D.C., and Cyrus Vance, secretary of state under President Carter, from New York. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was the keynote speaker during the dinner held in New York.

The Baker Institute has a strong relationship with the Council on Foreign Relations, which has included studies on such issues as the energy industry and U.S.-Cuban relations.

The council, founded in 1921, is a national membership organization dedicated to the public debate on international affairs and nurturing the next generation of foreign policy leaders. With the Peterson Center, the Council on Foreign Relations expands its usable space by 20 percent. It houses the Studies Department and includes Peterson Hall, with video-conferen-cing equipment to facilitate face-to-face interaction between the council’s main offices in New York and elsewhere.