Word: zoellick
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Australian Trade Minister Mark Vaile called it a "historic achievement." U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick described the deal as "very excellent." After four weeks of legal scrubbing, the text of the Australia?United States Free Trade Agreement was released to the public last week; its thousand or so pages of trade legalese left readers wishing for the shiny simplicities of the spin doctors and politicians. In a perfect world, Australian Prime Minister John Howard would say to President George W. Bush: "Let's have free trade." Bush would nod, they would shake on it and alert the press. The agreement...
...make it, they can fake it." ROBERT ZOELLICK, U.S. trade representative, on Beijing's failure to protect copyrights and patents...
Australian trade minister Mark Vaile is in chilly Washington this week, where local minds are fixated on the Superbowl and a Democratic contest in New Hampshire. Vaile is meeting U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick in the final stage of talks to see if the countries can reach a deal on a free trade agreement. For a host of reasons, mainly political, it's unlikely that the two teams of negotiators will be doing high-fives by the weekend. After a year of serious negotiations over the complicated chapters that comprise a FTA, and longer still if you consider the soft...
...election campaign is starting to freeze out lesser considerations, as Vaile and Co. are finding out. Trade optimists are about to be mugged by Beltway reality. In Washington, FTAs are not the flavor of the month, nor is there a push to remove entrenched tariffs or subsidies. Some of Zoellick's earlier free-trade deals in the Americas are looking shaky. If the Australian business is not sorted out this week, the negotiations will lapse. Consequently, an FTA won't get through Congress by mid-year, and the election cycle will kill it. If Bush is re-elected, the next...
...accounts for more than two-thirds of South America's economy, he notes - so to call Brazil isolated "is the same as negotiating with Asia and saying India and China are isolated." This does not sound like a recipe for compromise, though in a meeting this month in Washington, Zoellick and Amorim tried to iron out differences. "What we're most likely to see in Miami is the ultimate failure of the U.S. and Brazil to agree," says Connolly. "At best we may see a cosmetic ftaa that has no teeth." That might not upset U.S. President George W. Bush...