Barshefsky Raps Knuckles for WTO Meltdown

Let’s hope Charlene Barshefsky isn’t being set up to take the fall for the World Trade Organization shambles in Seattle earlier this month. She is one of the true talents at the top levels of the Clinton administration, but suddenly it is being put about, from parts West as well as East, that Washington’s chief trade negotiator can’t negotiate her way out of a paper bag. The reviews of her performance earlier this month have been uniformly negative. In Asia, they are comparing her to something like Cruella DeVil. Even in the West, she is being castigated for an “abrasive style” that proved “ill-suited to achieving consensus,” in the unkind words of the Economist of London.

Ever notice that male negotiators will be praised as “tough-minded” but a comparable quality in a tough-minded woman invariably is described in less complimentary terms? “The criticism is probably sexist, sure,” Barshefsky agreed. “But some countries are using these attacks as an excuse, as a smoke screen. It’s natural for people, after something like this, to point fingers and try to escape blame for what was a systemwide failure.”

Barshefsky believes that it’s also unfair to pin any blame on Mike Moore, the WTO’s director-general. The chair of the ill-fated round of multilateral trade negotiations was willing to single out a few players for special criticism, however. Despite its $44-billion trade advantage over the U.S., Japan, she said, “did nothing to help in Seattle, nothing.” She laughed: “What is the problem here? Is our trade deficit not big enough for Japan? Yet they acted as if they were the aggrieved party--please! Japan came to do what it could to debilitate the process.”

The U.S. trade representative, who heads a 100-plus-person office across the street from the White House, was disappointed by the lack of help from ally South Korea--and disgusted by stonewalling from European delegations. At one point, the head of the European Union left the negotiating hall for six hours and, when he came back, “Europe was reserving [holding back] on everything. Europe suddenly had no interest in paying any price for any agreement. It was all very destructive.” Barshefsky admitted that the American negotiating position was scarcely flexible: “We, too, have our own political problems,” she said, referring to domestic lobbies that are as opposed to true price competition for the goods they produce as the most protectionist French farmer.

But wasn’t President Clinton’s widely reported kowtowing to U.S. labor concerns driven by a desire to help Vice President Al Gore’s election chances with vote-rich unions? “I don’t buy that,” she snapped. “Look, no country is on the fence with the labor issue, no one’s undecided. At the end of the day, we did the right thing. The European Union couldn’t cut a deal if their life depended on it. And the [lesser-developed countries] kept asking, ‘What can you give us?’ . . . Hey, America absorbs so many of the world’s exports, is it realistic for us to continue in that direction without taking into account our own domestic political needs?”

Barshefsky doubts that the Seattle meltdown will scuttle the U.S. deal with China on the WTO--unless the European Union gives the U.S. anti-China lobby some new ammunition. “If Europe slows it down,” she said, “then approval will slow down on Capitol Hill.” She reflected on the last-ditch negotiation with Beijing as an example of how complex negotiations can succeed even under difficult conditions. “You have to like negotiating with [Chinese Premier] Zhu Rongji. He’s hard-nosed and passionate but there’s a difference between Zhu and Seattle: He was willing to make concessions at key moments, as were we. That’s what a negotiation is.” But, she sighed, “now, with WTO, it’s the older, protectionist issues that plague us, not so much the new ones.”

The chief trade negotiator was unwilling to blame the WTO impasse on external tensions. “True, the street atmosphere undoubtedly made everyone a little tense,” she said. “But I don’t think the outcome inside the halls would have been fundamentally different if the streets had been quiet.” And she endorses the view that the gargantuan, 188-member annual get-together of the developing-nation-dominated United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Bangkok in February could help cool post-Seattle tensions and set the world trade negotiations back on track. “Unless,” she cautioned, “the meeting devolves into the old North-South rhetoric and finger-pointing.”

Somehow one would have very high hopes indeed for the February meeting if Barshefsky--so deeply and sincerely committed to global trade liberalization--would head the U.S. delegation herself. Having tasted failure in Seattle, why not try for a taste of success in Bangkok?