Clinton Reaped What He Sowed: Nothing

President Clinton has admitted at least a temporary defeat in his effort to have Congress give him fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements. The legislation, is dead for this year.

For an administration that hoped global trade liberalization would be one of its legacies, this loss must be acutely painful; yet Clinton has no one to blame but himself. The president was unable to muster the necessary supporting votes from his own party because he failed over the past three years to live up to his promises to enact socially responsible trade policy.

The administration protests that it had no choice but to bring forward legislation that treated environment and labor so shabbily, that it couldn’t have gotten a better bill through the Republican Congress. This protestation misses the point. Had the president worked to fulfill promises he made to his own party to improve the environmental and labor records of trade agreements and institutions, he would not have had to strong-arm Democrats for their votes and risk tearing apart the Democratic Party. But Clinton, having sowed nothing, has reaped what he sowed.

While struggling with Congress over establishing the World Trade Organization, Clinton faced the same problems within his party as he does today. Many members of Congress were concerned that the WTO would threaten the ability of countries to regulate how products are produced; members were worried that, in the name of harmonization and trade facilitation, weaker international health and environmental standards would be imposed on countries; they wondered whether future multilateral environmental agreements, which use trade measures to ensure effectiveness and compliance, would be crippled.

In response to these concerns, Clinton promised that he would create within the WTO a Committee on Trade and Environment and champion within the committee a resolution of trade and environment conflicts. Had the administration lived by its word, it would have fast-track authority today.

Instead, nothing was done. In the Committee on Trade and Environment’s first two years, the administration did not generate even one pro-environment paper. Moreover, when the European Union produced a paper laying out rational rules to govern the use of trade measures in multilateral environmental agreements, the administration failed either to support the European position or to produce one of its own. Thereafter, a flurry of proposals arose that placed even greater constraints on the ability of multilateral environmental agreements to use trade measures. The CTE was a complete failure, and the responsibility lies in large part with the United States.

One consequence of the WTO’s failure to develop reasonable environmental policies is that the fears of concerned members of Congress have come to pass. U.S. environmental legislation that protects endangered sea turtles from unnecessarily harmful shrimp fishing practices faces censure in the WTO. European Union food safety legislation was struck down because it imposed a higher level of safety than a nonbinding international standard. This ruling contradicts U.S. food safety regulation, which generally requires the party introducing a foreign substance into food to prove that the food remains fit to eat.

The president placed Democrats in the uncomfortable position of having to choose either to vote against their president and against liberalizing trade (a goal which many of them, in principle, favor) or to vote against rational environmental and labor policies. This Hobbesian choice could have been avoided.

Congress should delay the fast-track authorization vote until after May, to force the administration to use its influence with the WTO to make some solid progress on environment and labor issues. This delay would provide the necessary incentive for the president to act. Only a success at the WTO will earn the president the right to ask his party to “trust him” with fast-track authority.