NEWS ANALYSIS : Did APEC Work? It’s a Matter of Interpretation : Trade: The Asia-Pacific summit produced no concrete progress. But symbolically, it may have accomplished a lot.

Will the trade talks that culminated in an unprecedented weekend summit of Asia-Pacific leaders be remembered as a defining moment in U.S. global economic policy? Or will history record them as an exercise in futility--a flop in the effort to bridge the wide gap between America and its Asian trading partners?

President Clinton’s informal gathering of 14 regional leaders at a Native American long house on Blake Island in Puget Sound failed to produce any tangible commitments to bring down trade barriers or open markets to U.S. exports. Nor did significant progress result from a week’s worth of consultations by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), a 17-member, government-to-government dialogue with a poorly defined mandate to promote regional free trade.

But Pacific Rim history may well have been made--in terms of symbolism, if not substance.

“I think we will look back in 10 years or 20 years and consider the Asian leaders’ conference as a turning point in history, in terms of the symbolic development of the Pacific community,” said Winston Lord, assistant U.S. secretary of state for East Asia.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown also crooned praise of the summit’s effect on America’s awareness of its role in Asia: “We’ve been partners to a sea change, a real recognition that America is not just an Atlantic nation but a Pacific nation too.”

Yet the real significance of the Asia-Pacific convocation remains wide open to interpretation.

As a budding multilateral organization, APEC can be viewed as a potentially effective tool for shaping a post-Cold War economic Pacific community in which everyone can share in an expanding pie.

Or it can be dismissed as a 17-ring circus, where a diverse membership of nations rich and poor, industrialized and developing, can only agree to disagree.

The Australians are perhaps the most gung-ho about APEC, envisioning the “C” in APEC changing to Community and proposing the creation of an Asia-Pacific free trade area. But that notion was enough to provoke howls of protest from Southeast Asian delegates, who evidently fear a Western scheme to emulate the tightknit European Community.

In the end, all sides agreed to put the idea of a free trade area under a rock for a year and to use the word community only with a small “c.”

“Nobody can bulldoze a vision that doesn’t coincide with others,” said Rafidah Aziz, Malaysia’s minister of international trade and industry. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohommed boycotted the summit and has been the most outspoken critic of Australian and U.S. efforts to pump up APEC into a policy-making institution.

Lost in the organizational debate and the free trade rhetoric was the fact that the cash registers are already ringing for American businesses that have taken advantage of opportunities to export to and invest in East Asia. One example: Seattle’s own Boeing, purveyor of passenger jets to most of Asia.

The lingering questions, meanwhile, are whether the challenge of penetrating tough Asian markets is going to get any easier and whether President Clinton’s vision of closing trade gaps and creating new American jobs with Asia-bound exports can come to pass.

Japan and China account for about two-thirds of the U.S. global trade deficit, which swelled to $10.9 billion in September and exceeds $117 billion at an annualized rate.

“When you talk about free trade, you’re really talking about U.S. exports and opening markets in a part of the world where the United States has its highest trade deficits,” said Donald K. Emmerson, a political science professor specializing in Asian regionalism at the University of Wisconsin.

“From the Asian perspective, you can see why they oppose free trade, because they fail to see why they should open up their markets at the expense of their own industries,” said Emmerson, who was in Seattle observing.

At the heart of the issue is the schism among Asia-Pacific partners when it comes to the rules of the game.

Industrializing countries, especially those in Southeast Asia, are adamant about maintaining their right to develop and grow on their own terms. They tend to adhere to models of state-dominated capitalism that don’t necessarily jibe with the free market economic ideals espoused by the United States, Canada and some other APEC nations.

For instance, Indonesia--the country that now assumes the mantle of APEC’s rotating chairmanship--has a consumer market of 190 million people, but it’s economy is shrouded by corruption, non-tariff barriers and import monopolies run by presidential relatives and cronies. More formally, the Jakarta government imposes a 200% tariff on foreign automobile imports.

The Asia-Pacific leaders summit will be repeated next year in Indonesia, conferring diplomatic prestige on President Suharto despite simmering problems with human rights abuses in his country.

APEC’s trade ministers did issue a vague statement promising to lower tariffs for unspecified commodities, said to be a gesture of solidarity aimed at putting pressure on Europe and jump-starting the Uruguay Round of international trade negotiations under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

But in a moment of truth after his meeting with Clinton Friday, Japanese Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa balked at a reporter’s question about opening Japan’s closed rice market to imports--a move that would be sure to give dramatic impetus to the GATT negotiations, which are held up in part by French intransigence over agricultural imports.

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