[asia-apec 1700] New USTR, Robert Zoellick

[APEC Monitoring Group]

NATIONAL POST, CANADA
January 12, 2001
New U.S. trade representative faces softwood imbroglio
Zoellick said to be knowledgeable regarding Canada
Peter Morton
Financial Post

WASHINGTON - At least Robert Zoellick, the new U.S. Trade Representative,
knows there is a country north of the U.S. border.

"He knows quite a bit about Canada," said Chip Roh, a former U.S. trade
negotiator. "Well, let's say he's much more aware about Canada than the
average American."

Mr. Zoellick was chosen yesterday by George W. Bush, the President-elect,
to replace Charlene Barshefsky, the Democratic appointee. He will find his
first major task in March is to sort out a bitter, two-decade old clash
between Canada and the United States over softwood lumber.

Mr. Bush, who has come under some criticism for his apparent ignorance of
the United States' largest trading partner, went out of his way yesterday
to try to re-assure both NAFTA partners he will pay attention. "Neighbours
to the south of us and to the north of us won't be an afterthought of
foreign policy or economic policy," he said.

Mr. Roh said the new trade representative, who must be confirmed by
Congress, was part of the original Canada-U.S. trade negotiations more
than a decade ago when he was an advisor to James Baker, the former
secretary of state, and later was a part of the NAFTA talks as
under-secretary of state.

Mr. Zoellick,47, also served as the U.S. representative to the G7 Economic
Summits in the early 1990s under George Bush, the former president.

In the end, Mr. Bush did not change the status of the U.S. trade
representative, which has been at the Cabinet level. Earlier he had hinted
he would downgrade the key trade post to give more clout to Don Evans, who
has been nominated for the Department of Commerce.

The suggestion of a downgrading prompted criticism from Ms. Barshefsky,
who leaves her post on Jan. 20, and other Democratic Cabinet ministers,
because it would make it more difficult for the United States to negotiate
seriously with other countries.

The most difficult chore for Mr. Zoellick, who has been described as "a
bit intense" and sometimes hard to deal with, will be convincing a badly
split Congress to give him fast-track negotiating authority.

Congress must approve the special authority before the administration can
sign any binding trade agreements. In the last years of his
administration, Bill Clinton was repeatedly denied the special authority,
stalling negotiations for a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and
helping to sink a new launch of global trade talks in Seattle in November,
1999.

Mr. Roh said Mr. Bush will likely have a better chance than Mr. Clinton in
convincing Congress to approve fast-track authority since Mr. Bush does
not endorse the controversial labour and environment side agreements that
were to be attached to any new trade pacts.

Mr. Zoellick will be handed the thorny file of the Canada-U.S. softwood
lumber issue with a five-year truce expiring at the end of the March. The
U.S. lumber industry, which claims the provincial governments subsidize
lumber exports, is threatening to demand Canada be hit with import duties
if a new deal is not struck.

The United States is also probing the Canadian Wheat Board, accusing it of
being a monopoly that deliberately underprices Canadian wheat to steal
U.S. markets. As well, it is unhappy about the way the provinces price
milk sold in international markets.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Mr. Zoellick has long been involved with
the Republican Party, most recently going to Tallahassee with Mr. Baker to
sort out problems over the Florida recount. Mr. Zoellick was until 1997
vice-president of Fannie Mae, a former government-run mortgage company
that is now the largest private housing investor in the United States.

He was also president of the Center for Security and International
Studies, a Washington think-tank that is one of the few to have a special
Canadian studies section, but resigned during the recent presidential
campaign.

pmorton at nationalpost.com

**********

January 12, 2001
Man in the News: A Tested Negotiator for Trade - Robert Bruce Zoellick
By JOSEPH KAHN for the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11  A visitor to Robert B. Zoellick's seventh- floor
office in the State Department in the early 1990's might have mistaken the
young diplomat for a college prankster. He stacked his coffee table with a
parody of Time magazine and a picture book of rat-eating snakes. Felt
posters of poker-playing dogs lined the walls.

But that sophomoric sense of humor  friends say Mr. Zoellick decorated
his office that way to tease the gray-suited dignitaries who called on him
 is about the only thing impish about the man President-elect George W.
Bush named today as his chief trade representative.

People who worked with Mr. Zoellick, 47, during two earlier Republican
administrations describe him as a policy wonk whose sharp-edged
negotiating tactics and mastery of details often won over, or wore down,
his rivals  notably over the past several weeks as he lobbied for the
trade job and its role within the new administration. A confidant of
former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, he rallied Western allies to
back a speedy German reunification and finagled a compromise that led to
the creation of the World Trade Organization.

"He was the most impressive thinker of my time in government," said
Richard Burt, a former assistant secretary of state. Derek H. Burney,
Canada's former ambassador to the United States, called Mr. Zoellick a
sharp-elbowed negotiator, but added, "in the end he won the argument
through the power of his intellect, not the raw political power of the
U.S."

In tapping Mr. Zoellick, Mr. Bush chose a Republican insider whose resume
reads a little like an encyclopedia of diplomatic and economic
abbreviations  NATO, W.T.O., Nafta, G-7, APEC and Uruguay Round  are
among the many trade, military and economic groups, summits and
negotiating forums in which he had a role.

That experience, though broad, was a largely behind-the-curtains
preparation for what he will face as United States trade representative.
If confirmed, Mr. Zoellick (pronounced ZELL-ik) will occupy a post that
arguably has a higher public profile and more sensitive political mission
than ever before.

Mr. Zoellick will have to implement Mr. Bush's campaign pledge to work
toward eliminating the remaining barriers to free trade throughout the
Americas. He will also have to address mounting discontent among
developing nations, some of which contend that the United States and other
wealthy countries have betrayed free trade by refusing to dismantle import
barriers that protect farm goods, textiles and steel.

"The overarching issue for him is going to be restoring American
leadership of free trade," said Harold McGraw III, the chief executive
officer of McGraw Hill Companies, who serves as chairman of the Emergency
Committee for American Trade, a lobbying group.

The politics are complex. Lawmakers are split almost evenly on the wisdom
of expanding trade, and unions have energized their members to oppose many
trade agreements.

Some Bush advisers view the task of building a consensus for free trade as
so essential that they considered selecting Richard W. Fisher, a Democrat
who is the No. 2 trade official in the Clinton administration, for the top
trade post. The Bush transition team also thought about stripping the
trade representative of the cabinet rank the position has held for 25
years to streamline the way the administration managed the economy.

In the end, Mr. Zoellick had his way. People who know him said he pushed
for the trade post and argued passionately that the trade representative
should continue to sit with the cabinet. That things worked out in his
favor stems partly from his public-policy credentials, his supporters
said, and his circle of friends, which includes several prominent
Democrats. But he also cashed in some chits from his lengthy service to
the Bush family.

Under his mentor, Mr. Baker, Mr. Zoellick helped run two campaigns for
President George Bush. Mr. Zoellick earned the nickname "the adding
machine" for his number- crunching contribution to policy ideas that
addressed what the elder Bush once called "the vision thing."

Mr. Zoellick served the president- elect in a similar way. He became one
of Mr. Bush's foreign policy pundits, writing a stream of op-ed pieces and
magazine articles that laid the groundwork for what he called a Republican
foreign policy.

He dissected what he saw as President Clinton's mistakes in dealings with
China, Russia, Iraq and Japan. He pushed the theme that the new
administration should avoid nation- building exercises like the United
States role in Haiti and Somalia and in the Balkans, an idea Mr. Bush used
in his debates with Vice President Al Gore.

Robert Bruce Zoellick grew up in Naperville, Ill., near Chicago. He
attended Naperville Central High School and then moved East, attending
Swarthmore College before receiving law and public policy degrees at
Harvard University.

Mr. Zoellick joined the Reagan administration at the behest of Richard
Darman, one of his former Harvard teachers who at the time served in the
Treasury Department. He went on to become a close aide to Mr. Baker,
working for him in the Treasury Department and then, during President
Bush's term, at the State Department, where he became an under secretary
for economic policy.

There, aside from his kitschy office, he was remembered for toting around
yellow legal pads filled to the margins with his tidy penmanship,
diligently laying out the pros and cons of strategy choices.

"He was the best prepared guy in the room," said Edward Djerejian, a
former ambassador and State Department official. "He often had an
outside-the-box solution for many issues."

But he is most widely remembered in foreign policy circles for being the
United States' representative at the multiparty negotiation over the
future of divided Germany. He persuaded the Bush administration to embrace
German unity despite the qualms of allies and alarm in the former Soviet
Union.

By defusing the potentially volatile issue of Germany, Mr. Djerejian said,
Mr. Zoellick "gets a lot of credit for the fact that the cold war ended
with a whimper."