THE administration and its pro-NAFTA allies have been predicting a major foreign policy disaster if NAFTA is voted down. This is foolish in two respects. First, it is unconvincing as a strategy for winning support. And second, the sponsors risk setting up a self-fulfilling prophesy of exaggerated humiliation should NAFTA lose.
Here is a sampler of recent pro-NAFTA hyperbole:
The New Republic for Oct. 11 included four pro-NAFTA pieces, opening with an overheated editorial on the magazine's cover: "As much as any event since the communist collapse, the vote on NAFTA could define America's post-Cold War identity. The nation's long-run economic health, its geopolitical reach, even its moral character, are very much at stake here."
As that estimable journal's resident cynic, Michael Kinsley, might put it, "Oh, come on!"
Treasury Undersecretary Lawrence Summers, in an Oct. 14 speech in Milwaukee, declared: "If we're not prepared to make a trade agreement to which two presidents have been committed, with a country with which we share a 2,000-mile border and who has undertaken a major set of economic reforms, it will be very difficult to promote our exports anywhere in the world. The American political process took a long time asking, 'Who lost China?' Let them not have to debate, 'Who lost Latin America?'"
C. Fred Bergsten, director of the Institute for International Economics told a trade conference Oct. 12 that if NAFTA loses, "America's postwar leadership role in the global trading system would abruptly terminate, leaving the system with no effective leadership at all."
Former U.S. trade representative and power broker extraordinaire Robert Strauss warned, in the Washington Post Oct. 19: "Rejecting NAFTA would be an international economic disaster that could take generations to overcome. . . What are the stakes? They are whether the United States is going to continue its historic leadership on international economic policy . . . or whether we're going to retreat. It is whether we're going to slap our neighbor to the south in the face, or whether we are going to build on the tremendous gains in our friendship over the last decade.
It is whether we are going to expand our influence, friendship and business in Latin America or forfeit the great markets of our hemisphere to Asia and the European Community."
