abstract:The Baker Plan was launched in October 1985 at the International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting in Seoul, by James Baker, United States Secretary of the Treasury, as a way to combat the international debt crisis.
If realized, however, such a Baker-Gorbachev plan would amount to a shortsighted publicity stunt for the Administration -- one with potentially dangerous long-term consequences for America's vital interests in its own hemisphere.
"Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton are very capable men, but I can't believe they have a secret plan that nobody else has thought of for how to extricate ourselves, " says Max Boot, senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations.