[Ip-health] Wash Post profile of USTR Susan Schwab

[Mike Palmedo]

Slightly off topic, but I thought readers of the list might be
interested in the new USTR's background...
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/12/AR2006061201142.html

Dealt a Difficult Hand, Trade Official Presses On - Schwab Faces
Skeptics and a Deadline

By Paul Blustein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 13, 2006; D01

Yesterday was Susan C. Schwab's first full day as U.S. trade
representative, and she promptly made it clear that she views her
appointment in much different terms than Washington's chattering classes.

Yes, she knows that pundits have dismissed her as something of a
caretaker because of the way President Bush nominated her in April to
replace Rob Portman, who was named White House budget director. Yes, she
recognizes that because the job shuffle came as global trade talks are
in serious trouble, with a major deadline looming, her promotion to
Portman's post has deepened skepticism that the talks will lead to a
dramatic revision in international trade rules.

But the truth, Schwab said in an interview, is that she has been charged
with aggressively advancing Bush's trade agenda. "The fact that the
president chose to announce my nomination the same day as Ambassador
Portman's was announced was evidence that the president wanted to send a
message -- that he wanted a seamless transition and continued high
priority on trade," she said.

To underscore the point, she emphasized that she plans to stick
resolutely to the position Portman staked out in the global talks, which
are known as the Doha round for the Qatari capital where they were
launched at a World Trade Organization meeting in 2001. The
administration is eager for an agreement that would sharply lower trade
barriers among the WTO's 149 member countries, especially in farm
products, and is not interested in a watered-down compromise of the sort
some countries are pushing, Schwab said. And, though the United States
hopes to avoid a collapse in the negotiations, it will not strike a deal
that stops short of opening major new export opportunities for nations
around the world, she added, declaring that a weak accord "wastes a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

The comments were delivered in the pleasant but steely tone Schwab has
honed over nearly three decades in the trade field, most recently as one
of Portman's deputies but, before that, as a Senate staffer, top
Commerce Department official, academic specialist and business
executive. The Senate confirmed her Thursday night, and she was sworn in
Friday afternoon.

"I'll match credentials with anybody," she said, betraying a trace of
irritation at the naysaying about her selection.

Schwab's training in dealing with foreigners came early -- as the
daughter of a foreign service officer, moving with her parents to Togo,
Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tunisia and Thailand and spending 14 of her first
18 years abroad before attending college in the United States.

"When you're a foreign service brat, you grow up feeling that your job
is to represent the United States of America, even if you're a 5- or
6-year-old kindergartner in Lome, Togo, even if you're the only American
kid in the local American school -- which I was," she said. "We were in
Togo during independence; we used to go out and sing the French national
anthem, until one day we were singing the Togolese national anthem. I
needed to show my fellow classmates that I could sing the American
national anthem."

She started as an economist at the trade representative's office in the
mid-1970s, trying to open the Japanese market for U.S. beef and citrus
products, and also worked on trade issues at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
Her influence soared in the 1980s when she moved to Capitol Hill, where
she joined the staff of John C. Danforth, then a senator from Missouri
and the chairman of the Finance Committee's international trade
subcommittee, and became a powerful shaper of U.S. trade policy as a key
drafter of landmark trade legislation in 1984 and 1988. A profile
published in The Washington Post in 1987 noted that her critics viewed
her as a "closet protectionist" for her get-tough stance on foreign
trading practices, but her admirers called her a "hard-nosed pragmatist,
well versed in arcane trade economics, and a dazzling strategist and
negotiator."

Schwab served as assistant secretary of commerce during President George
H.W. Bush's administration, heading a department unit that promotes U.S.
exports from embassies and consulates around the world. After a stint at
Motorola Inc., she got her PhD and became dean of the University of
Maryland School of Public Policy. Late last year, she was named one of
Portman's deputies, with ambassadorial rank and responsibility for
issues including U.S. relations with Europe and the Americas as well as
the WTO.

The big question is whether all this experience will help her forge a
meaningful agreement in the Doha talks, which are ostensibly aimed at
making rules governing WTO members much more beneficial to developing
countries.

An enormous gap separates the United States from the European Union on
the politically sensitive issue of farm trade. Washington argues that
the only way to help poor, largely agrarian countries is to slash
agricultural tariffs, so it has proposed to cut them by about two-thirds
while leaving only a handful of "sensitive" products exempt from such
cuts. The Europeans, whose farmers are accustomed to extensive
government protection, have offered cuts of less than 40 percent and
insist on keeping many more sensitive products sheltered from foreign
competition. An alliance of developing countries is in between the two
points of view, though closer to the U.S. position.

Late this month, Schwab will go to WTO headquarters in Geneva for a
meeting that has been billed as make-or-break for the Doha round, with
the aim of crafting the broad outlines of a pact. Failure at that
meeting could doom the round because Bush's congressional authority to
negotiate new trade deals expires in July 2007, leaving little time for
the extensive drafting required before an agreement can be submitted to
Capitol Hill for approval.

Schwab said that because of her duties as deputy trade representative,
she knows the ministers from other WTO countries and has been
interacting with them. But, she acknowledged, "the disheartening thing
is that there are a number of countries that think some minimalist
outcome is going to be satisfactory. But that is not an outcome that
will be satisfactory to the United States."