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76 Foreign Aff. 67 (1997)
Business and Foreign Policy

handle is hein.journals/fora76 and id is 459 raw text is: 



  Business and Foreign Policy


                     jeffrey E. Garten



                   DESTINATION UNKNOWN
THROUGHOUT MOST of American history, commercial interests
have played a central role in foreign policy, and vice versa. During
the next few decades the interaction between them will become
more intense, more important, more difficult to manage, and more
complicated for the American public to understand. The second
Clinton administration should lay out a framework for this interaction
to provide the necessary guide for setting priorities, making difficult
tradeoffs between economic and foreign policy issues, and gaining
popular support.
   In mid-1997 it is not clear where either Washington or the American
business community is headed. The president's first term ended on a
note of ambiguity. The early enthusiasm for aggressive trade negoti-
ations-for NAFTA and GATT and with Japan-was absent in the 1996
election as trade liberalization, possibly the administration's greatest
accomplishment, was nowhere on the political agenda. High-profile
trade missions had wound down even before the death of Secretary
of Commerce Ronald H. Brown in a plane crash while on a mission
to Bosnia in early 1996. A Republican Congress made it a high prior-
ity to eviscerate the Department of Commerce, the Overseas Private
Investment Corporation, and the Export-Import Bank in the name
of slashing corporate welfare, and campaign contributions from

    JEFFREY E. GARTEN, the Under Secretary of Commerce for Interna-
    tional Trade from 1993 to 1995, is Dean of the Yale School of Manage-
    ment. This article is based on his book, The Big Ten: The Big Emerging
    Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives, to be published in May by
    Basic Books.


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