Letter from Washington

What’s the Reagan Administration really thinking about the U.S.- Japan trade war? It depends on whom you talk to. The office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) tends to be hard in its judgment of Japan. Commerce is softer, and the White House is positively squishy. The USTR has been dealing with this issue for so long that it has grown hard-nosed and skeptical. After all, living through half a dozen Japanese “trade-liberalization packages,” and seeing none of them make the slightest difference, is bound to take its toll. Commerce keeps talking about “progress,” but most observers think that its definition of progress is stretching semantics somewhat.

At the White House, the belief is that Yasuhiro Nakasone is 100 per cent sincere. He truly wants to be accommodating, the surest proof of which is his willingness to seat Japanese reps of American companies on trade advisory commissions and let them have what trade people call “transparency”—a view into the bureaucratic decision-making process, a key to getting things changed. Still, “Japan has got to stop cutting into our markets while at the same time playing by different rules for their markets,” says a White House official. “Nakasone is not the problem. The bureaucrats are the problem, and anything that doesn’t blunt bureaucratic discrimination against American products just won’t do the job.”

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What’s the Reagan Administration really thinking about the U.S.- Japan trade war? It depends on whom you talk to. The office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) tends to be hard in its judgment of Japan. Commerce is softer, and the White House is positively squishy. The USTR has been dealing with this issue for so long that it has grown hard-nosed and skeptical. After all, living through half a dozen Japanese “trade-liberalization packages,” and seeing none of them make the slightest difference, is bound to take its toll. Commerce keeps talking about “progress,” but most observers think that its definition of progress is stretching semantics somewhat.

At the White House, the belief is that Yasuhiro Nakasone is 100 per cent sincere. He truly wants to be accommodating, the surest proof of which is his willingness to seat Japanese reps of American companies on trade advisory commissions and let them have what trade people call “transparency”—a view into the bureaucratic decision-making process, a key to getting things changed. Still, “Japan has got to stop cutting into our markets while at the same time playing by different rules for their markets,” says a White House official. “Nakasone is not the problem. The bureaucrats are the problem, and anything that doesn’t blunt bureaucratic discrimination against American products just won’t do the job.”