North America Free Trade Agreement

The notice still taped to the glass front door of the sprawling sugar beet processing plant is blunt: "Effective Friday, Oct. 30, 1992 . . . applications for employment will no longer be accepted." It is last year's sign, posted after the plant--across the Red River of the North from this sleepy farm town--had completed hiring for the "fall campaign," when mounds of sugar beets the size of bloated softballs are cleaned, sliced, boiled and crystallized into processed sugar.

Whose destiny is it to lead the Pacific into the 21st Century? Pundits are asking that question with increasing frequency, wringing their hands over the decline of Pax Americana, fretting about Japan's dream of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and postulating about how the two great Pacific powers might balance their interests in a lasting partnership.