Trading Places

These days George W. Bush probably has bigger fans than Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The 30 percent tariffs Bush recently imposed on foreign steel coming into the United States will, according to the Brazilians, cost their country $1 billion over the next three years. And yet even as Bush is raising U.S. tariffs, he is bent on asking Cardoso to lower Brazil's, in order to help create a full-fledged Free Trade Area of the Americas. Just this past weekend, in fact, Bush told Cardoso and other Latin American leaders that the reason the United States has been so stingy with foreign aid is that, "to be serious about fighting poverty, we must be serious about expanding trade."

What's a Latin American neoliberal to make of the apparent contradiction? When Cardoso put exactly that question to Bush Trade Representative Robert Zoellick earlier this month, Zoellick cited the perfectly Orwellian dictum that imposing trade barriers would actually help reduce trade barriers. "We are committed to moving forward with free trade," Zoellick responded, "but, like Brazil, we have to manage political support for free trade at home. We have to create coalitions."