After NAFTA.

WHETHER NAFTA'S passage was a step toward a more prosperous world of free(r) trade, or the first stage of a retreat into a protectionist North America, will be decided in the next few years. Both possibilities inhere in the actual agreement. Hence, our NAFTA endorsement had codicils urging the swift passage of GATT and an early start on crafting an Atlantic Free Trade Area to underpin our still-needed military alliance with Western Europe.

Which way we go will be determined by domestic politics. Because Mr. Clinton is currently enjoying the credit for NAFTA's passage that was really won by Congressman Gingrich, there is talk of a Republican-New Democrat coalition on other issues, including trade-related ones. That is almost certainly an illusion. Mr. Clinton is a chameleon, but a chameleon whose party controls both houses of the legislature. Color him liberal most of the time. If such a coalition were to evolve, moreover, it would feed the populist paranoia of Ross Perot that America is governed by a bipartisan elite of political royalists. And if the NAFTA battle is any guide, Mr. Clinton would respond to such party and populist pressures by bashing Japan and stressing the regulatory and protectionist terms of NAFTA and any other trade deal.

Re-thinking America's post-Cold War role must therefore be left to the Right. We in turn must learn the lessons of the NAFTA debate, in which conservatives divided along various lines but one significant one: conservative nationalists versus classical liberals. There were secondary mistakes--for instance, both sides foolishly gave comfort to the Left by using its terms of anti-conservative abuse: "elitists" versus "dark forces"--but the underlying error all round was a weak idea of America's national interest. Supporters of NAFTA talked of it too little and sometimes seemed to live in an imaginary world in which free trade had dissolved national frontiers and we were all amorphous "North Americans"; opponents of NAFTA talked of it a lot but too simply assumed that it requires protectionism in economics.

We need a conception of the American national interest that incorporates the laws of economics. Conservative nationalists are right to fear that America's national identity is fraying under the impact of ethnic quotas, multiculturalism, bilingualism, and high levels of welfare-led immigration. Equally, classical liberals are justified in pointing out that protectionism is a device to sustain such interventions against economic competition from nations that disdain them--as well as a diversion of capital and labor from the future to the past. How to begin a blending of these visions? We suggest that Patrick Buchanan take a vacation with Milton Friedman, and Jack Kemp with Russell Kirk.