America From Abroad : Dear Mr. President

Foreign policy may have played second fiddle--or second saxophone--to domestic problems in the U.S. presidential campaign that culminates today. But in fact, whether it turns out to be President Bush, President Clinton or President Perot, the man who occupies the White House for the next four years will spend a lot of that time coping with global issues.

What kind of advice is the winner likely to hear from the men and women who are paid to be America’s eyes and ears in foreign capitals?

World Report asked Times correspondents in Berlin, Brussels, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, London, Mexico City, Moscow, Toronto and Tokyo to step into the shoes of the political secretaries of the American embassies in those cities and offer some tips in a memo to the new President . . .

BRUSSELS

‘You have a chance to be a hero in Western Europe . . . ‘

Your election provides you with a chance to be a hero in Western Europe, if only you will give high priority to an issue that seems to have largely escaped top-level attention for the last six years: the Uruguay Round.

From here at the headquarters of the 12-nation European Community, it sometimes seems as if the United States thinks the Uruguay Round is a regional soccer tournament.

Europeans know better. It’s the current, long-deadlocked set of negotiations designed to liberalize international trade. It’s called the Uruguay Round only because the world’s trade ministers launched the talks six years ago in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este.

The talks have been stalled for two years because the United States and Europe can’t agree on the terms of trade in agriculture. Europe is probably more to blame than we are--it is resisting our demand that it dismantle its $80-billion-a-year system of agricultural subsidies, which gives continental producers an unfair price advantage in world trade.

Europe doesn’t deny that. But it argues that its farmers would go out of business if they were forced to go toe-to-toe with farmers around the world.

Our government threw fuel on this fire earlier this year by threatening to slap punitive tariffs on $1 billion worth of imports from Europe, in retaliation for Europe’s subsidies for soybeans and other oil seeds.

Much as that set off alarms here, what really drives Europe crazy is the lack of high-level attention the Uruguay Round seems to get in Washington. Germany and Britain recently criticized France for intransigence on the farm issue. They believe you could break the Uruguay Round deadlock if only you would put the full force of your office behind the talks.

These are tough times for the European Community. The headlong rush toward a common EC currency and even joint EC foreign and defense policies has been stopped in its tracks by a citizenry concerned that cherished national identities will be sacrificed in the name of unity.

Don’t be distracted by the internal soul-searching. A strong Europe is in our interest too.