fears may be fostered in Congress and the affected public. Yet being
totally forthcoming would show one’s hand before it can be played.
This is what necessarily makes trade strategy even within the com-
mittees of Congress so much an insider’s game. It is also what leads
many affected interests to fear they will be traded away as pawns.
War on Three Fronts
From the negotiators’ perspective, we can think of the final year
of the Uruguay Round as a war waged on three fronts.
The first is in Geneva, where the multilateral trade negotiations
(MTN) will be played out, supposedly in December, 1990. This multi-
lateral front, and support for GATT as a mechanism for trade re-
form, is the most visible of the three.
The second front involves the bilateral relationships that exist be-
tween individual countries, played out in national capitals. These bi-
lateral relationships include the ongoing tensions between Wash-
ington and Brussels, as well as individual discussions with the
European Community (EC) and its member states, especially in Lon-
don, Bonn and Paris. They also include Washington-Tokyo rela-
tions, and, to a lesser degree, those with Cairns Group members
such as Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina. Because these bi-
lateral relations are of longer and more permanent duration than
those in GATT (where the Uruguay Round is the eighth since World
War II) they are often more informative and influential. It is often a
chain of bilateral deals that forms the basis for a multilateral one in
GATT.
The third, and perhaps most important, front is the relationship
with Congress and affected interest groups. Along this home front is
to be found the rear guard of trade negotiation and the political
supply lines that give negotiating authority to the GATT negotiators
themselves.
Two aspects of this support from home are vital to the Uruguay
Round process. First, any multilateral agreement struck under
GATT must, by law, be ratified in Congress. Those provisions deal-
ing with agriculture will thus fall in part to the agricultural subcom-
mittees and committees whose interests are most directly affected by
various commodity groups. Second, the timing of the Uruguay
Round will be interrelated with Congressional decisions over the
1990 farm bill, making the domestic politics of agriculture impossible
to disentangle from trade strategy.
This paper will discuss each front: 1) the multilateral negotiations
in Geneva; 2) bilateral negotiations; and 3) the home front negotia-
tions with Congress and affected interest groups.
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