Word: mfn
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...Congress passed legislation withholding MFN from the Soviet Union in an attempt to induce Leonid Brezhnev to permit more Jews to emigrate. Largely to spite the U.S., Brezhnev cut exit visas for Jews by nearly two-thirds. Then, in 1980, the U.S. granted MFN to China. Beijing's treatment of its citizens was hardly exemplary, but its defiance of Moscow made it a "strategic partner" of the West...
Despite lapses into protectionism, the U.S. has generally been both a promoter and a beneficiary of free trade. It grants 159 of the 170 countries on earth most-favored-nation status, or MFN, subjecting their products to roughly the same relatively low import duties...
...least-favored-nation status. They were all connected with the now defunct Soviet bloc, and they have been discriminated against for reasons that have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with ideology. The U.S. didn't like their political systems, and the denial of MFN was intended to force them to change...
Congress and the White House have been bickering all summer over whether to attach human-rights conditions to MFN status for China, and there could be another fight this fall over President Bush's recent promise to grant MFN to the Soviet Union. The very subject of the U.S.S.R. sends the American body politic into spasms of divisive debate. That eternally troubled, troublesome country is the oldest and most vivid example of how unsuccessful the U.S. has been at using tariffs as punitive or coercive instruments of diplomacy. In 1912 the Taft Administration revoked a commercial treaty with czarist Russia...
...taking up residence in false premises. Bush should not expect the totalitarians who run China to change their behavior at home and abroad simply to keep U.S. tariff rates low. Says Zhu Qizhen, the Chinese ambassador in Washington: "We are not going to beg the U.S. to extend MFN." Congress would be equally naive to think cutting off MFN will force China to reverse its economic and security policies. Such a public loss of face would be intolerable to Beijing...