Bill Clinton: “Well, those are two different issues. First of all, the action that was taken on steel was taken after a lot of…”

“Well, those are two different issues. First of all, the action that was taken on steel was taken after a lot of deliberation, most of which was done before I became President, subsequent to United States law, which is clearly GATT-consistent. So, I think, you know, if the belief is that the United States has been wrong on the facts, then we can discuss the facts. But there is nothing wrong with our law, and it's not that different from the laws of a lot of other countries that are part of the world trading system. Secondly, with regard to the trading mechanism, I have no problem with a multilateral mechanism to enforce trading agreements. But the GATT clearly contemplates that every country in the world, including France, should have the right to act in its own interest if the international system breaks down, which is not to say that you lose some rulings. But if there is no resolution of a crisis, the international system breaks down. All our Section 301 trade law does is to provide for some ultimate reservoir of authority for the United States to act unilaterally if the system itself breaks down. If France, for example, would like to propose a stronger multilateral decisionmaking process as a part of GATT before any country could act on its own, I would be more than happy to discuss that. I do not see this Section 301 as giving the United States the authority, for example, to decide on its own about all these trade agreements and how they affect us without regard to what other countries want to do. That is not at all the way it is supposed to operate. It's supposed to operate only against countries that are not part of trading agreements at all, so we don't have a trade--countries with whom we have no multilateral agreements, or when there is a total breakdown of the GATT system in this case. Germany's Interest Rate Reduction”