The New York Times

Monday, December 6, 1999

ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE

The Clinton Round

WASHINGTON -- In the opening minute in the global trade arena he wanted to call "The Clinton Round," President Clinton took a huge swing and kayoed himself.

But cheer up: even as he permitted U.S. policy to be determined by organized anarchists joined by organized labor in the street battle of Seattle, the U.S. president ultimately scored a kind of negative victory.

Flat on his back, dumped on by dumping nations and object of catcalls of the undeveloped world, a frustrated Clinton did not abandon our interests. In aligning himself with street people and bowing to A.F.L.-C.I.O. pressure, Clinton became a trade realist: he allowed the talks to collapse and made Seattle his Reykjavik.

A trade realist is a multilateralist who has been mugged by the underdeveloped world and had his pockets picked by subsidized European farmers. That's Clinton after the World Trade Organization fiasco in Seattle. His "legacy" is his willingness to take the embarrassing count without giving up our most cherished principles.

Forget the outdated rhetoric about "free trade vs. protectionism" or "rules vs. walls" or "globalization vs. nationalism." That simplistic spin belongs to previous eras.

Here's today's debate: Do information-age democracies use their economic muscle to bring others up to their standards of human rights? Or do the world's poor nations, allied with dictatorial giants, regional cartels and multinationals, use their political majorities in international organizations to vitiate our leverage of trade?

The W.T.O. is a kind of U.N. General Assembly, with the U.S. having only one voice in the cacophony. Our power to encourage democratic capitalism worldwide is now constrained by our statist competitors. That was Clinton's doing five years ago as part of his obeisance to multilateralism.

But a strange bedfellowship is denying the Lilliputians the bonds to tie down Gulliver. As is disdainfully pointed out, this includes protectionist labor leaders; Naderite consumer gadflies; environmentalists ranging from reasonable greens to anti-worker ecological nuts, and a lunatic fringe of anarchists and hatemongers.

A few other groups, however, give more meaning to this odd amalgam. Human rights advocates who believe that American markets should not support the product of slave labor or child labor are being heard.

And so are people who feel threatened by the growing power of global cartels that thrive on the antidemocratic secrecy of the W.T.O. -- while these merchandising monoliths invade the privacy of individuals everywhere.

Using e-mail and the Internet, this "strangebedfellows.com" has globalized the resistance to mindless globalization. In Seattle, it organized effectively to stop the handover of America's power to demand human rights and labor standards from nations dependent on our rich market.

In the midst of the melee last week, President Clinton made what his panicked aides told reporters was a terrible blunder: he dared suggest that the W.T.O. should someday apply sanctions to economies that abuse child labor. This roused the ire of third-world exploiters and contributed to the breakdown of the talks.

Mr. Clinton's staff, lusting after an agreement, was wrong to badmouth its boss. That was Clinton's finest hour. I don't care if he was polishing the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s apple to help Al Gore, or was pushed by women's groups, or felt he had to strain to empathize with the militants in the streets. Whatever his motive, our president blurted out a hint worthy of an elected American president and civilized human being -- and not a faceless multilateral bureaucrat.

I am not a global warmnik, union agitator, or stocking-masked anarchist; indeed, laissez-fairies have always been dancing in my garden. But by jingo, I believe the United States should be a light unto nations by virtue of our example of enlightened free enterprise. That means not lowering our health and labor standards to let investors everywhere make a buck, but applying those standards to others who want to make a buck with us.

International trade that does not use its leverage to encourage personal freedom does not deserve the name of "free trade." We accept the burden of importing many of the world's problems; our trading partners should note that America's most rewarding export is individual liberty.