ABSTRACT
The enhanced position and influence of the hardliners in the American trade policy community in the wake of the regime crisis had its corollary in a more fragmented and defensive free trade coalition. The easing of Cold War tensions left the Free Trade-Good Relations coalition reliant more squarely on economic arguments in countering the hardline definition of the Japan problem. After 1985, a process of puzzling about Japan by professional economists in the United States lent greater credibility to the notion that the way Japan worked challenged core parts of the traditional free trade paradigm. Pragmatic free traders in the Bush Administration co-opted aspects of this policy learning in the Structural Impediments Initiative, an attempt to both ward off demands for a results-oriented Japan policy and deal with what many free traders saw as the underlying structural sources of bilateral trade tension.
