ABSTRACT
The rather loose hardline coalition that had taken shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s strengthened considerably in the wake of the trade regime crisis. Congress crafted a vehicle for a results-oriented Japan policy in the form of the Super 301 provision of the 1988 Trade Act, while internationally oriented American firms moved increasingly into the hardline camp. The hardline advance in the American trade policy community was also marked by an inter-temporal cognitive process – a process of learning that Japan plays by different rules economically. The emergence of the revisionists as an ideas-based network crystallised hardline experiences and beliefs into a tighter paradigm challenging free trade orthodoxy. The fertile soil these ideas found in the second half of the 1980s helped to put a results-oriented Japan policy squarely on the official policymaking agenda.
