LAUNCH OF AN ECONOMIC COLD WAR

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So once again, headlines warn of a trade war between the U.S. and Japan--as they have so many, many times in the past 30-odd years. So what else is new?

So, plenty. For one thing, this time it might really happen: the Clinton Administration swears it is dead serious about slapping penalty tariffs on Japanese luxury cars Wednesday. The announcement over the weekend that U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor and his Japanese counterpart, Ryutaro Hashimoto, will meet Monday in Geneva may increase the prospects of an eleventh-hour deal to expand sales of U.S. auto parts to Japan and keep the penalties from being put into effect. But even that would not defuse the intensifying confrontation between Washington and Tokyo.

If a showdown is averted in this spat, another would come soon, and then another, until one shakes to the core the political relations between the two economic superpowers. "If there is maybe one more 'standard' deal, it will be the last one," predicts Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute. Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute, warns, "In the post-cold war period, at a time when security ties are no longer holding the two sides together, trade disputes could become a way of life." Some might reply that U.S.-Japanese trade disputes have been a way of life since at least the late 1960s: experts count 30 or more agreements since then that have temporarily kept the peace. Now Tokyo is replying to the tough talk out of Washington mostly with we-can-work-this-out noises. But that in a way is just the problem: the Japanese seem to think Bill Clinton will vacillate on trade as he has on issues ranging from Bosnia to gays in the military. Japanese automakers are talking only of an informal and unenforceable pledge to buy more U.S. car parts--not to be imported by Japan but to be built into the cars they assemble in America. That is exactly the sort of arrangement the White House insists it will no longer accept. And if it does swallow some minor compromise out of fear of the very real disasters of a true trade war, that may only stiffen its resolve to hang tougher next time around.

The unspoken bargain that has ruled U.S.-Japanese relations for decades is breaking down. Right through the Bush Administration, U.S. Presidents viewed Japan primarily as an indispensable cold-war ally. Annoyed though they might be by the gargantuan trade deficits that in the U.S.'s view resulted largely from Japanese protectionism, they would not push any trade dispute to the breaking point. In particular, they believed the U.S. must always keep its markets open, whatever its trading partners did--partly out of free-trade principle, partly as a way to reward anticommunist allies. Japan, for its part, grew expert at offering just enough--for example, "voluntary" quotas on auto exports in the early 1980s--to keep the U.S. grumpily mollified, while backing Washington all the way in world diplomacy.

But the cold war has ended, and new people have taken over in Washington and Tokyo. On trade, if nothing else, the Clinton Administration has been consistent and tough. The President has surrounded himself with advisers who have no qualms about closing U.S. markets to foreign products if that seems the best way to batter open foreign markets for American goods.