Bill Clinton: “Well, as you know--first let me answer the first question. Yes, I will renew the pledge, and I will hope to do it…”

“Well, as you know--first let me answer the first question. Yes, I will renew the pledge, and I will hope to do it without having the international press corps laugh since they've now heard it four times. We got an agreement on agriculture, so-called Blair House accord, which I hope will stand up in the wake of the recent elections in Europe. If it does, I am frankly optimistic that we will be able to proceed to a GATT agreement. There are other outstanding issues, but on balance the United States would be much better off with it. We need to maintain a commitment to global economic growth in ways that are good for the wealthy countries of the world. As I said in my speech, one of the great challenges is for a wealthy country not only to maintain its technological lead and its capacity to generate growth but also its capacity to generate jobs. In the 1980's Europe had at least two significant economic recoveries and generated no jobs. That's the thing that's bothering me now. This recovery allegedly started a long time ago, but the unemployment rate is higher than it was at the depth of the recession, and that's because we are now finding some of the same difficulties. So, I think the GATT agreement can help that, and I will do what I can to get it. The answer to your second question is not so simple. I believe Russia would be better off if it could be brought into the international trading system with a new GATT agreement, but the leaders of the G-7 this year obviously are the Japanese. This is Japan's turn to lead, and the Government of Japan has issued an invitation to President Yeltsin to attend the G-7 meeting. And as you know, on April 14th and 15th the foreign ministers and finance ministers of the G-7 are meeting in Tokyo to talk about what we can do in multilateral ways to help the process of Russian reform. So, I believe a lot can be done even if there's no new GATT agreement. Indeed, I would argue that for the kinds of things which need to be worked out for Russia to really benefit from trade and for the rest of us to benefit from it, involve more either ad hoc relationships between businesses and governments dealing with Russia or changes within Russia itself relating to property rights, privatization, the reliability of contracts, the freeing up of the ability to contract in the energy area, and things of that kind. I should have let you answer that question.”