[Mb-civic] A washingtonpost.com article from: swiggard@comcast.net

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 Wag the Cow
 
   TWELVE YEARS ago, the Clinton administration set out to change policy toward Japan. The Cold War approach, according to the Clinton view, had emphasized political and military cooperation to the detriment of  U.S. economic interests; with the Soviet threat gone, it was time to get tough on Japan's trade protectionism. The Clintonites set about demanding that Japan stop running its economy through a system of murky government guidance and instead embrace transparent rules, figuring that this would create a fair playing field for  U.S. businesses. But trade confrontation had costs. It forced up the yen, increasing the danger of a banking collapse that would send tremors around the world, and  it threatened the political viability of U.S. military bases. In 1995, the rape of a Japanese schoolgirl by American servicemen caused smoldering anti-American resentment to explode in street protests. The Clintonites concluded that trade friction was not worth it.
 
 This history illuminates President  Bush's strange call to Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, on Wednesday. Mr. Bush phoned his counterpart not to discuss North Korea's nuclear weapons or China's military ambitions but rather to complain about Japan's closed beef market. To ram home the depth of American impatience, the State Department refused to volunteer any of its officials to meet with Japan's deputy foreign minister, who was in Washington. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits Japan next week,   it's reported that beef will be high up on the agenda, along with nuclear proliferation. 
 
 If it was wrong to prioritize trade in the 1990s, it is even more mistaken now. The North Korean threat has grown more urgent, and addressing it requires diplomatic coordination with Japan, among others. The United States continues to have a stake in its military relationship with Japan: Mr. Koizumi sent a small contingent of troops to Iraq, even though this was unpopular with his electorate. The claim that Japan's economy is opaque and unfair to foreigners has become less persuasive: Sony is the latest flagship corporation to install non-Japanese management, and transparent, rules-based regulation is spreading.  Ironically, the U.S. complaint in the beef case is that an independent food safety commission is refusing to listen to government pleas to allow  U.S. beef in. Finally, trade friction can cause other sorts of economic trouble. Today the issue is not the stability of Japan's banks but the danger that Japan might start selling off its huge dollar reserves. The day after Mr. Bush called him about beef, Mr. Koizumi suggested that this might not be a bad idea. The dollar immediately fell, and U.S. interest rates spiked upward.
 
 Like the Clintonites before them, the Bush team resents Japan's enormous trade surplus and fears domestic producer lobbies. The Bush reelection campaign was endorsed and financially supported by the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which has now grabbed the trade tail of Japan policy and is swinging the beast mercilessly. It took the Clinton administration three years to see that larger issues ought to dominate the U.S. relationship with Japan. May the Bush team awake faster. 
 
   

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