WASHINGTON — President Clinton said Wednesday he will press ahead with discussion of the U.S. trade dispute with Japan over automotive trade when he meets today with Japan's Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama at the summit of industrial nations in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The White House had been insisting the two leaders would not even discuss the contentious auto issue at the Group of Seven summit. But Japan's agreement Wednesday to hold further discussions in Geneva next week appeared to raise hopes of movement in what has been a standoff as a June 28 deadline nears for the imposition of stiff U.S. sanctions against Japanese luxury cars.
"I believe we can reach a successful conclusion and I intend to do everything I can to see that it is done," Clinton said at a news conference with French President Jacques Chirac.
The leaders of the seven major industrial democracies are opening their annual summit conference tonight under the darkening cloud of the angry U.S.-Japan trade dispute while the leaders search, instead, for global economic cooperation.
Earlier, Administration officials said there was a "zero chance" that the two leaders would tackle the auto dispute in this meeting. But the White House took heart in Japan's agreement to meet with senior Clinton aides in Geneva.
They viewed it as a step away from Tokyo's earlier insistence that it will not
negotiate under the threat of sanctions.
The auto affair is not on the agenda of the seven-nation summit itself, whose topics will range from economic measures to prevent the sort of collapse that nearly shattered Mexico--and that caught financial markets and many in the Clinton Administration by surprise--to the failed efforts to end the civil war in Bosnia, to the U.S.-led campaign to further isolate the renegade regime in Iran.
But aside from a nearly completed declaration that they will cooperate in creating an emergency fund to prop up failing economies--much as an international effort led by the United States bailed out Mexico in January and February--Clinton and his summit partners have set modest goals for the 21st annual economic summit conference of the world's richest nations.
The sites for the meetings could be reflective of both the unassuming goals and the dangerous shadow of the trade battle: first, a modern, seven-story glass office building that sits so squat and plain on the Halifax harbor that it is known locally as the Green Toad, and, for the reading of a declaration on the world economy, a maritime museum that houses a deck chair retrieved from the flotsam of the Titanic.
