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Those fears are not shared by Clinton and Kantor. With the cold war over, they are more inclined to give economic and trade issues priority over foreign policy. They also view Japan and the European Community as equals in all but military terms and expect equal treatment for U.S. exports. Under the new regime, if other countries fail to honor agreements on market access, the reaction will be swift. "We don't believe it's particularly negative to take action," says Kantor. "We may have confrontations or fights, but that's natural . . . It doesn't mean you have to have a trade war. That's silly."
It may be silly, but it frightens America's trading partners, who have become used to relatively open access to the world's biggest market. Kantor is not shy about playing on those fears. Last week he and Clinton allowed an important deadline to pass without asking Congress to extend their authority to negotiate an agreement to reduce global trade barriers. The move was clearly intended to wake up the Europeans, from whom the U.S. wants assurances that they are serious about negotiating "instead of jerking us around the way they have for the past six years," as a Clinton adviser puts it.
Kantor also promised, in a speech to the Semiconductor Association last week, to hold Japan to its commitment, made to President Bush, that it would open its market to U.S. computer chips. The idea was that American semiconductors -- which claim 53% of the world market outside Japan -- would be allowed at least 20% of Japanese sales. That is not happening, and so Kantor is moving quickly to put teeth into a new set of rules. Otherwise, he warned, there would be "a rising tide of resentment, a feeling among many Americans that they are getting the short end of the stick."
That was precisely the emotion Clinton played upon last month during a visit to Boeing, the troubled aerospace giant, which plans to shed 28,000 jobs. "Very little of that is your fault," Clinton told workers. Instead, he blamed the layoffs on sales that Boeing has lost to Airbus Industrie, a European consortium that does not produce passenger jets as efficiently as Boeing, yet often undercuts the U.S. firm's prices with the help of $26 billion in subsidies from four European governments.
Kantor says he would prefer to reduce such foreign subsidies through negotiations. But that desire is being backed up by a threat: the Administration is willing to match any foreign subsidies that undermine American high-tech industries by funding expensive research and development for companies like McDonnell Douglas and Boeing.
More ominous is Clinton's suggestion that the same sort of aid might be extended to U.S. automakers and other industries -- unlike Boeing -- whose managements and unions have contributed heavily to their own problems. During the campaign Clinton seemed to endorse Detroit's demands for sharply higher tariffs on popular Japanese minivans. And Kantor last Friday flew to Detroit to hear about other "help" that the automakers want.