Americans have witnessed inconsistent and seemingly dramatic turnabouts in legislators' attitudes toward trade, with strong bipartisan support for free trade and the Uruguay Round in one instant and heated debate over participation in the World Trade Organization the next. Martha L. Gibson systematically traces the competing forces that interject conflict into an overall consensus on the value of a liberalized trade policy.

Cutting through the tangled web of congressional politics, Gibson shows why it is impossible to understand trade legislation without first understanding how electoral politics and the institutional rules of Congress distort legislators' interests, incentives, and policy goals. Gibson's book clearly shows that trade legislation is not made in a vacuum but is just one in a series of simultaneous games with competing goals in which legislators engage to satisfy the conflicting demands of constituents.

Ryan evaluates the nature and effectiveness of U.S. trade diplomacy with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China in the 1970s and 1980s by examining the diplomatic strategies used by the U.S. Trade Representative to enforce Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which was designed to protect free trade and competition through investigations, negotiations, and sanctions.

Ryan shows the different trade diplomacy tactics the East Asian governments pursued during dispute settlement negotiations with the USTR. The study also evaluates the fit between the East Asian political economies and the rules and principles of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) regime. It explores the capabilities of the multilateral and minilateral regional institutions of trade dispute in the Pacific to settle emerging trade disputes. In the debate over rule-based or power-based diplomacy, Ryan concludes that U.S. trade diplomacy was most successful when it was rule-based, and that it gained significant compliance with GATT and other fair trade agreements.

Ryan interviewed many of the key trade negotiators in Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Beijing, and Washington. His analysis is based on the largest, most systematic, market sector-specific data set yet presented on U.S. export trade dispute settlement in the Pacific. It studies the structure of state power, the structures of international business competition in manufacturing, agriculture, and services, the international and regional institutions of trade diplomacy, and the national governmental institutions of trade diplomacy in the Pacific.

Anyone interested in international trade or diplomacy will find this book a source of new insight into the dynamics of trans-Pacific trade.

Boilerplate language in contracts tends to stick around long after its origins and purpose have been forgotten. Usually there are no serious repercussions, but sometimes it can cause unexpected problems. Such was the case with the obscure pari passu clause in cross-border sovereign debt contracts, until a novel judicial interpretation rattled international finance by forcing a defaulting sovereign—for one of the first times in the market’s centuries-long history—to repay its foreign creditors. Though neither party wanted this outcome, the vast majority of contracts subsequently issued demonstrate virtually no attempt to clarify the imprecise language of the clause.