U.S. Trade Negotiations

* The premise of your Dec. 18 editorial, “A New Tack on Trade Issues,” is wrong. Disputes over labor and environment did not doom last year’s World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. Neither did anti-globalization demonstrators. It failed because, for almost the entire time leading up to Seattle, the WTO and its leading members (especially the U.S. and the European Union) were consumed by a struggle over who would be the new organization’s director general, thereby preventing any substantive progress on an agenda for a new round of trade negotiations.

Moreover, the recent free trade agreement with Jordan is not as good as it looks, thanks mainly to the Clinton administration’s decision to bend over backward to accommodate union and environmentalist potshots at U.S. trade policy. In addition to deviating from the long-held U.S. policy that trade agreements should be about trade first and foremost, the Jordan accord in Article 17 holds out the possibility of unilateral U.S. trade sanctions against that country in the event that we determine (after an admittedly long and complex dispute resolution process) that Jordan is failing to uphold its own labor or environmental laws.

Such an approach, especially if extended to more important trading partners such as Singapore and Chile, sets the stage for an avalanche of trade fights over nontrade issues, a prospect that the business community rightly fears.

THOMAS M.T. NILES, Pres.

United States Council for

International Business, New York