more intense, more important, more difficult to manage, and more complicated for the American public to understand. The second Clinton administration should lay out a framework for this interaction to provide the necessary guide for setting priorities, making difficult tradeoffs between economic and foreign policy issues, and gaining popular support. In mid-1997 it is not clear where either Washington or the American business community is headed. The president's first term ended on a note of ambiguity. The early enthusiasm for aggressive trade negoti ations?for nafta and gatt and with Japan?was absent in the 1996 election as trade liberalization, possibly the administration's greatest accomplishment, was nowhere on the political agenda. High-profile trade missions had wound down even before the death of Secretary of Commerce Ronald H. Brown in a plane crash while on a mission to Bosnia in early 1996. A Republican Congress made it a high prior ity to eviscerate the Department of Commerce, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Export-Import Bank in the name of slashing "corporate welfare," and campaign contributions from