AFTERMATH OF THE BUSH TRIP : Experts Offer Opinions on Trade Mission

President Bush returned from his Pacific Rim trade mission Friday to face a chorus of criticism. Although the Bush Administration said “dramatic progress” was made in bridging differences between the United States and Japan, many politicians, business executives and academicians disagreed. Times staff writer Amy Harmon talked to a number of expert observers Friday for their reaction to the Bush trip. Here are their comments.

Chalmers Johnson, professor of political science at the UCSD Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies.

It was an unmitigated disaster. There’s really no doubt about it. What it revealed is that we have no industrial policy, and we desperately need one.

If all you have behind your policies is symbolism, then the symbols matter. And look at the symbols that came out of this trip--you have Bush collapsing and passing out at the Japanese Prime Minister’s dinner party. And the taking along of the gluttonous, scandalously overpaid executive dwarfs was obviously just Kabuki--they had nothing to do with anything. The Japanese take symbols seriously, and all this was stagery and symbol manipulation.

Whatever message was conveyed was insulting and meaningless. The implication is that the Japanese should alter their policies to conform with ours, while our economic performance is so bad that it’s an absurdity.

Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), sponsor of legislation to require Japan to reduce its trade surplus with the United States.

It was important for the President to go on this trip. I also think it is absolutely essential that the President and the government be as interested in economic power as they are in military power. But I was not impressed with what he came back with. Having said that, I am willing to wait and see if the results come.

It is a form of insanity to say our trade deficit with Japan is all our fault or all their fault. If you blame it all on the American companies, you’re not dealing with reality. We have a $20-billion trade surplus with Europe. If our products are so lousy, what is it we’re selling in Europe? That means there’s something unique in Japan. They practice adversarial trade.

William Ouchi, professor of management and strategic studies at UCLA’s Graduate School of Management.

I thought Bush behaved in a statesmanlike way. I give him high marks for reassuring the business community and the public in both countries--but in this country in particular--that he’s taking what I think of as a properly balanced approach toward the Japanese.

For example, I was concerned that one thing he might have done was to pander to the Gephardt voters, out of concern for his popularity in the polls, by striking out against the Japanese. To do so, in my mind, especially in Tokyo, would have been a gross misrepresentation of the situation and would have pandered to the occasional lapses in sensibility of the American public.

He didn’t stoop to that. The main result of this trip, to me, is the symbolic picture of the head of the United States government accompanied by the heads of many of our largest companies and his speaking on their behalf.

Robert B. McCurry, executive vice president, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A.

(GM, Ford and Chrysler) really don’t care about the trade deficit or access to the Japanese market. They’re trying to make this kitchen too hot for us. I really believe that. Well, I got news for them. . . . We’re in a global market today, and it’s becoming more so each and every day.

You know, I’m not Attila the Hun, and the Japanese auto industry isn’t the Evil Empire. . . . I and many other members of Toyota management sympathize with what this (the domestic auto) industry is going through.

But it’s not Toyota’s fault. The Japanese auto industry has taken American ideas and methods and refined them into the world’s most efficient industrial technology. The U.S. can either match it or pull up the protectionist covers and go back to sleep. If we choose the latter course, I’m not very optimistic about our future.

Robert Reich, professor of political economy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

It was almost a complete waste of time. I say “almost” because the ironic result of the trip was to educate some Americans about the failure of American managers to manage our economy.

The trip backfired for George Bush. He had expected to be seen on the evening television shows and pictured in the newspapers as the commander-in-chief boldly leading his troops, the managers of America, the top executives of America, charging into the citadel of Japan.

But in fact, word got out that those American managers were earning scandalously high salaries, they were laying off their American workers at the slightest hint of a downturn . . . producing lousy products, and much of the responsibility for the failure of the American economy was appropriately placed at their feet.

The Japanese are not guiltless, of course, but they are guiltless when it comes to this recession. They have nothing to do with the business cycle in the United States. And even with regard to long-term economic problems, only about 4% of the problem has anything to do with the Japanese. It has to do with the way we organize and manage ourselves and with a growing gap in public investment in education, training, roads, bridges and everything else that will make us more competitive in the future.

The original conception of the trip was probably appropriate. . . . It was probably a wise move to arrange a goodwill tour. On the other hand, the idea to turn this into an aggressive “jobs, jobs, jobs” campaign was terrible. George Bush ended up looking hypocritical when for four years he’s been talking about free trade, and then suddenly he ends up bargaining for managed trade with the Japanese.

Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute.

Remember Yogi Berra, who said it was deja vu all over again? I looks to me like deja vu all over again. This is another in a series of similar “successes.” Nothing very concrete. Unclear as to whether there’s anything meaningful there or not. Clearly no fundamental change in the nature of the U.S.-Japan economic relationship. Declaration of victory because it’s politically necessary. And likelihood that in six months we’ll be back negotiating over the same issues.

I think one good thing about the trip was that--albeit for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way--it did put on the table the priority issue between us and Japan, which is the economic and trade issues. Typically in the past the President has ignored those issues in favor of geopolitics and cooperative statements about the Gulf War or what have you. And this time, at least, the President said “Look, these economic issues are worthy of presidential attention,” and that is a change.

Daniel Luria, an economist at the Institute for Industrial Technology, Ann Arbor, Mich.

I think the U.S. went there, both the auto companies and Bush, with the wrong diagnosis of the problem. They went with the view that the problem was that the Japanese market was not open. The real problem is the behavior of Japanese investment in the U.S.

Most of the $19 billion in parts purchases (that Japanese auto makers promised to buy from American suppliers) are going to come from American subsidiaries of Japanese-based firms. So that the real American content in that $19 billion may be as low as $6 billion to $10 billion. It’s just like saying the engine in a Honda is an American engine when all we do with that engine is assemble it here.

The second point is that there are never going to be significant sales of U.S.-made cars in Japan. (The Big Three) know they can’t sell a lot of cars there no matter what. I think they figured they’d go there, demand that (the market) be open, and even if (the Japanese) only opened up a little, they’d be able to come back and say, “See, they’re not really serious about opening.” And then they could say, “Well, if they’re not going to be open, we shouldn’t be either.”

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