Now my old shop has been connected to the Democratic fund-raising scandal–John Huang, the suspicious DNC official, was a Commerce of- ficial first. You can’t understand the 1996 money mess without grasping the environment in which commercial diplomacy was born. It is, after all, the major thrust of the president’s foreign policy: Al Gore is in Asia this week talking about just these issues.
In our single-minded drive to help American companies, we dramatically expanded our commercial involvement in big emerging markets like China, India and Brazil. This push attracted a lot of foreigners who wanted to play in the new game. Our firms needed partners, local suppliers, help setting themselves up–and for the most part these were terrific relationships. But there were people, like the Riadys or Charlie Trie or Johnny Chung, who may have thought they could gear this process to their own enrichment by buying special influence. If you open a wild bazaar, as we did, you have to expect the occasional pickpocket.
We still face brutal competition from companies abroad that enjoy increasing support from their governments–chiefly France, Germany and Japan. This comes at a time when we have to bolster exports to keep trade deficits like the one with China under control and increase the number of high-paying American jobs. And I believe the long-term future of foreign policy will be driven by how best to expand America’s commercial reach. This will no doubt attract shady characters who will try to profit at the margins. It would, however, be a tragedy to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
