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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: The Quagmire Club (April 7, 2003) Quagmire has given way to quickmire; instant delivery of a war's reality, followed by instant second-guessing. By William Powers. Political Pulse: Nobody's Poodle Now (April 7, 2003) When Blair took his country into war, British polls shifted to favor battle. By William Schneider. Legal Affairs: Iraq and Beyond: Navigating the Fog of War (April 7, 2003) Bush should reject the empire-building ambitions of some of his neoconservative subordinates. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Media: The Fog of Journalism (April 1, 2003) On television, there's just too much news to absorb. That's why newspapers are still important. By William Powers. Social Studies: It's Time to Break Up the College Color Cartel (April 1, 2003) Congress should permit race-based preferences in private universities while banning them in public. By Johnathan Rauch. Political Pulse: This is Bush's War (April 1, 2003) The Vietnam War was years old before U.S. public opinion became this partisan. By William Schneider. More from National Journal. |
Wealth of Nations 
Trade, Iraq, and the Logic of National InterestInternational cooperation works when countries think that by acting jointly they can advance their own interests. by Clive Crook .... This week, I meant to take a break from Iraq, geopolitics, the clash of civilizations, and other recent preoccupations. These topics lie outside my authorized sphere of operation anyway—battlefield commentary even more so. It seemed like a good time to write an article on international trade. Now that I weigh it up, though, this is not going to work. Trade is not really a different subject. The logic is much the same. Trade policy is in the news for a bad reason: The World Trade Organization's current round of talks, aimed at lowering tariffs and other restrictions worldwide, is failing. By March 31, as part of the round that was started in Doha, Qatar, in November 2001, trade negotiators were supposed to have adopted guidelines for reducing agricultural tariffs and subsidies. They missed the deadline. No need to worry, say officials. They will keep talking. There might still be a deal by September, when a big ministerial meeting is scheduled, and that would put things back on track. It could happen. Trade rounds are always a pantomime of missed deadlines, stopped clocks, brinkmanship, and through-the-night hard bargaining. But this time, it is all looking bad. The talks on farming have proved so difficult that nobody will be surprised if the negotiators miss the September deadline, too. If that happens, the Doha Round could be over. It all matters more than you might think. The farm-trade issue is a big deal in its own right. Because of farm protection and huge government subsidies, consumers across much of the rich world pay more for their food than they should—either in high prices at the store or through taxes. The waste is scandalous. But the indirect costs are bigger. Surplus production of food gets dumped on international markets, driving down the prices received by exporters from developing countries. For many of the world's poorest countries, agricultural exports ought to be a main route out of poverty. Rich-country protection and subsidies keep this path blocked. The United States and Europe promised the rest of the world that Doha would be a "development round," partly because poor countries believed (with reason) that they had given bigger trade concessions than the rich countries in the previous series of talks, the Uruguay Round. Genuine farm-trade liberalization, promised for years and never delivered, was to be the linchpin of the new round. That way, the disappointed developing countries would be brought back into the multilateral trade-reform process. If farm-trade reform is such a great idea, why did negotiators miss the March 31 deadline? Mainly because Europe—France, above all—thinks it is not such a great idea. The farm interests that profit from the European Union's protection and subsidies have plenty of political power. Governments usually do what they say. The Bush administration says it deplores Europe's capitulation to the farm lobby, and insists it wants radical change in agricultural policy. That would be great, if it were true. When you add up the enormous cost of the recent farm bill, America's stance looks like so much empty posturing. And if America is as devoted to liberal trade as Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative, keeps saying, how do you explain the country's hefty new steel tariffs? Put that down to pressure of domestic politics—same as in France. If the WTO falls apart, it will be another huge failure of international cooperation, more important than the quarrel over the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and ranking alongside the fiasco of the United Nations on Iraq. American unilateralism is usually blamed for those other failures. Despite the farm bill and the steel tariffs, America cannot be blamed for the WTO impasse. Even Europeans acknowledge that this is Europe's fault. So for once, European unilateralism rather than American unilateralism is to blame. But the main point still stands: If only governments were willing to put the broader international interest first, all would be well. Right? Wrong. No democratic government willingly sacrifices the national interest for the sake of the rest of the world—nor should it. International cooperation, if it is to succeed, cannot be about subordinating national interests to the global good. Its aim must be, rather, to help countries better serve their individual interests. International cooperation works when countries think that by acting jointly, they can advance their individual interests more effectively than if they act alone. Unilateralism in this sense is not an obstacle to cooperation; it would be truer to call it a prerequisite. But there's a catch: Those individual interests must conform to one another and not be mutually opposed. The deal must have a positive-sum aspect. This second requirement is the real issue. It is the jarring of conflicting interests, not American (or anybody else's) unilateralism, that has been blocking international cooperation of late. Global warming is a classic collective-action problem: One country, acting alone, cannot curb global emissions of carbon dioxide. A cooperative framework like Kyoto is therefore needed. Given that it is in America's interests as much as any other country's that greenhouse-gas emissions be curbed, why did Kyoto then fail? Essentially because no government believed that curbing emissions, though desirable, was the main objective. For most countries, the real prize lay in getting the United States to pay virtually the entire cost of worldwide greenhouse-gas reduction on everybody else's behalf. If every government had been intent on curbing emissions, on minimizing the global cost per unit of reduction, and on sharing that cost fairly, their interests would have been aligned and Kyoto could have worked. They weren't, so it didn't. America's critics in this were no less devoted to their own idea of national interest than the United States. The same basic logic applied to Iraq. True, in this case there is no collective-action problem: Defeating Iraq is something America can do perfectly well on its own. Still, the operation would have been a lot less costly if wider cooperation had been possible. And the international community said it wanted Iraq to disarm, just as America did. That was the point of U.N. Resolution 1441. But only America and a handful of other countries really meant it; only they saw disarming Iraq not merely as desirable but also as the main interest they had at stake. If France, Russia, and China had agreed that disarming Iraq was what mattered most, they would be fighting in Iraq right now. In fact, they saw their main interest as curbing American power. The game being played at the United Nations was not positive-sum (everybody gains by cooperating) but zero-sum (if America gets its way, France, Russia, and China feel they lose). Again, therefore, the problem was not American unilateralism, any more than it was French, Russian, or Chinese unilateralism. It was that France and the others did not see their interests as aligned with America's. France wants to limit American power and expand its own more than it wants to see Iraq disarmed. Given this misalignment of interests, just as in the case of Kyoto, no basis for cooperation existed. What about trade and the WTO? The logic is subtler, but again quite similar. As a matter of economics, trade reform is not a collective-action problem. A country can make itself better off by lowering its tariffs unilaterally; in that sense, there is no need for the WTO. But there is a political collective-action problem (or so governments claim). Because the benefits of unilateral reform are hard for voters to see, governments put on a show of exchanging "concessions" with each other. The WTO is supposed to be about overcoming popular skepticism about policies that, in reality, are in the individual interests of each country. If governments really believed that free trade made sense (as they always say), there would be no problem. Trade reform could proceed unilaterally, with or without the WTO. The organization's only contribution would be to reassure voters that no country was losing. The trouble is, governments do not in fact believe in free trade. They believe their own propaganda, and see extracting "concessions" from the other side as more important than lowering their own barriers—which subverts the whole idea. The interests of the parties have moved out of sync. With interests aligned, unilateralism all around would have made WTO cooperation a success. Without that, the system breaks down. The sad thing about the WTO is that it may actually be undermining the purpose it was created to serve—not just failing to move it forward—by obscuring where countries' interests really lie and turning would-be cooperators against each other. Could the same be true of the United Nations? Is the U.N. increasing global security these days, or undermining it? Whatever you think about that, unilateralism is not the problem. Disagreement about what matters most is the problem.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Clive Crook is a columnist for National Journal and the deputy editor of The Economist. This column appears every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2003 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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