full article at http://www.iht.com ] Paris, Tuesday, October 17, 2000 For Free-Traders, the Choice Is Bush By Reginald Dale International Herald Tribune WASHINGTON - The opening up of world trade is one of the few recent economic issues to have generated strong emotions in the United States, bringing angry demonstrators onto the streets of Washington and Seattle to protest globalization. Trade, however, has been the dog that didn't bark in this year's presidential election, and neither of the main contenders, Governor George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, has been publicly challenged on trade policy - perhaps because many people assume that both are broadly in favor of free trade. The two more protectionist candidates, Pat Buchanan on the right and Ralph Nader on the left, have together garnered only a few percentage points of support. The obvious conclusion is that, at a time of virtually full employment, the rage of the demonstrators is shared by only an insignificant proportion of the electorate. And yet there are major differences between Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush. The election's outcome will have a big impact on the future of freer trade and on U.S. leadership of the trading system. From the free-trade point of view, there can be little doubt that the optimal result would be a presidential victory for Mr. Bush and continued Republican control over both houses of Congress. That conclusion is not, of course, accepted by leading Democrats, who insist that the trade record of the Clinton-Gore administration is second to none. If anything, President Bill Clinton may have pushed trade liberalization too far, Ira Shapiro, a former U.S. trade negotiator, said at a recent conference organized by the American Enterprise Institute. That argument neglects the fact that none of Mr. Clinton's trade triumphs, including congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement and of permanent normal trade relations with China, could have been achieved without large numbers of Republican votes. Rather than fight for free trade, Mr. Clinton has in fact allowed the insidious concept of ''fair trade'' to gain ground. As Jagdish Bhagwati, the doyen of trade economists, points out in a soon-to-be-published book, ''The Wind of the Hundred Days: How Washington Mismanaged Globalization,'' the subjective concept of fair trade is an open invitation to protectionists to do their worst. Mr. Clinton lamentably botched the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle last year, allowing it to become - in the words of Michael Smith, who served as deputy U.S. trade representative under former President Ronald Reagan - ''arguably the worst trade happening'' since the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill of the 1930s that exacerbated the Depression. Mr. Clinton's embrace of the demonstrators' demand for trade sanctions against countries that refuse to implement the kind of labor standards mandated by U.S. labor unions, an idea that is anathema to developing nations, hammered the last nail into the Seattle coffin. Mr. Clinton failed to fight hard enough to win new trade negotiating authority from Congress, a precondition for serious negotiations with U.S. trading partners, and allowed trade policy to be dominated by a litigious approach that focused on the defense of U.S. special interests rather than the health of the trading system. The continuing fight over presidential negotiating authority shows the differences between the two sides at their clearest. While most Democrats want labor and environmental standards to be written into all future trade agreements, most Republicans do not. Given the extent of opposition to the Democrats' proposals from developing countries, adopting those proposals would effectively kill hopes for another successful round of world trade negotiations, especially with China in the WTO. E-mail address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
