By Brian Doherty Both the Clinton administration and the world are possessed by trade agreement mania. Immediately before and after passing the GATT pact, Clinton attended international summit meetings and came out with the promise of future trade treaties analogous to last year's North American Free Trade Agreement. Then came December's Summit of the Americas, which ended with Clinton and the leaders of 33 other Western Hemisphere countries vowing to create a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, with negotiations scheduled to end in 2005. For now, these are all merely agreements to agree. The details await various bureaucratic meetings that are scheduled to begin later this year but could stretch for years.
Multilateral agreements tend to be larded with complications, half-measures, and escape clauses.
Those problems caused some free traders to decide that defeating those agreements would benefit the cause of free trade. But defeating them in their final stretch would have been counterproductive. Now more than 50 other nations also show a sudden willingness to sign on to regional free-trade regimes. Smaller free-trade agreements already abound among the countries of Latin America and Southeast Asia. The newly dominant congressional party in the United States professes a strong belief in free trade, along with distaste for the complications of international agreements.