The GATT agreement and peace talks in Northern Ireland - 17 December 1993

After such a pitiless onslaught of bad news for so long, it was a pleasure to wake up on Thursday morning and read positive good news, even though the best of it came from abroad, the general feeling is that it's good for all of us.

First of course, came the surprising triumph after seven gruelling years of the GATT trade agreement, it's something for 117 nations to agree on anything, something that has never happened at the United Nations. And on something as selfish and real as trade, which as an economic wizard confided to me only last week is simply not going to happen.

For the first time, agriculture, services, textiles and investment will be covered by international rules of fair trade. The extent of the sacrifices some nations are making are only now becoming plain because we've spent so much time during the past years reporting the grievances of our own country and the nastiness of all the others. It seemed only days ago that President Clinton of all world-savers was going to block any final agreement unless he could demolish the dam of quotas raised against the flood of American movies going into Europe. There were long faces in Hollywood on Thursday morning of men whining, he told us the quota restriction was a make or break point in the negotiations.

And even as late as last Monday, Americans were reading in a highly esteemed European magazine a sort of apologia or cheer-up message in case the negotiations failed. But Mr Clinton's bluff on behalf of his many friends in Beverly Hills was called, the movie tycoons swallowed hard and the thing was done. Now the leader writers can open up again and say it as they are doing that failure would have been a global disaster on the general understanding that the mania for protectionism in the 1920s did more than anything to bred the Great Depression of the '30s.

As it is on a more positive note, we can surely applaud Japan for daring to defy the protest marches and import of all things, the staple crop, rice. Britain for allowing if not welcoming foreign textiles. Everybody for gritting their teeth and allowing the importation of the things they do best, it's not a blueprint for Utopia, some rather considerable businesses, shipping, telecommunications, banking, securities, several other industries, which the United States dominates they're discreetly missing. But for all the errors and omissions and the no doubt certain emergence of tricky evasions and bypassing of the rules, everybody's agreed it's a great beginning in liberalising trade calling on all countries to dare to compete and probably also in preventing postponing at worst another world depression.

The second Christmas gift from abroad is the unreal word from London that after the last bout of murderous troubles in Northern Ireland a 25-year spasm of hate and revenge and murder and machismo, there is a prospect of peace.

What the report of this break will do in America, what from the papers I've read and the TV reports I've seen is to acquaint most Americans for the first time with the extraordinary fact that Ulster, unknown here by that name, is a part of the United Kingdom and that the majority of it citizens have so far wanted it to remain so.

I long ago gave up being amazed at the number of friends impressively well educated in other matters who secretly believed and deplored the fact that Northern Ireland was an Irish county under military occupation by the British. I used to baffle more people than I enlightened by saying fair enough I think that if Lancashire were under siege and asked for army protection from say the invading men of York, it would be as much of a betrayal for the army to leave and allow Lancashire to be pushed out of the United Kingdom. This I hasten to say is only an imaginary scenario and was thought up without the slightest hint of offence to my old peaceable former neighbours the Yorkshire tykes.

The third bit of good news is in the nature of a follow-up bulletin announcing that the fire alarm was false. Until Thursday morning, the returns from the Russian elections seemed to confirm the worst fears that the new parliament was about to be dominated by an upstart and pretty much of a fascist leader, the leader of and wouldn't you know in a former totalitarian country, that the latest totalitarian party would call itself the Liberal Democratic Party. The more knowing leader writers here immediately rushed to assure us that the parliament doesn't matter all that much in the new system since the voters gave a handsome majority to Mr Yeltsin's idea of a very strong president.

I've not, by the way, heard of anyone being in the dumps about the very authoritarian style and power of the presidency that Mr Yeltsin has devised under what amounts to his own constitution.

However, came Thursday and first a cheerful rocket went up from Moscow, typical New York Times headline, one column not noted for melodrama read "District Returns in Russia Election Lift Yeltsin Block" in small type below "Far Right Faction Fades". Better, more illuminating in a steadier way from Moscow came a despatch from the inimitably energetic always on-the-spot where Russia or Israel are concerned William Safire with a rat-a-tat burst of no-nonsense lead sentences. Moscow, December 15: Is Vladimir Zhirinovsky the racist demagogue an incipient Adolph Hitler, no! Is Russia in the painful throws of transition to capitalism another Weimar Germany, no! Are we pumping up this man's support by insulting voters who used him as their vehicle of protest, yes! To back up that last warning, he quotes the leader of the new women of Russia movement, "don't think of Zhirinovsky's voters as you think of Zhirinovsky himself. Our Russian people very often vote against, not for. Do not struggle against the people who voted for him. If we take that approach, we could raise him up." We have been warned.

The news from North Korea, which I believe would bestride our headlines if it were not for the comparatively happy words from London and Geneva, is bad. Somehow, the administration has failed to intimidate North Korea enough to make it drop its bluff, if that's what it is, and permit inspection of all its nuclear sites. Washington is too embarrassed to point out the absurdity and they're saying "come ahead and inspect five of our seven vital sites, but stay out of the other two".

It's now been confirmed both by American and United Nations experts that North Korea not only has enough plutonium to make a nuclear bomb, but is probably no more than months away from having it. If this is so, and the United States is unable to deter them, then it's being predicted by people who should know and even by Japan itself that a nuclear arms race in Asia is already launched.

It presents President Clinton I think with the toughest and once the toughest and the most delicate diplomatic challenge of his presidency. There are several schools of action or thought in Washington, there are what in the analogy of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis you might call the Acheson school bomb the sites now. At the other extreme, there are inevitably the let us proceed by cautious diplomacy schools of thought, in the 1930s indistinguishable from the appeaser's.

Since nobody knows for sure what to do short of a military move against those sites, we're getting a round of comforting editorials on the model of British and American editorials in 1939, "don't worry North Korea is broke, practically poverty stricken, it's economy is in ruins they can't possibly afford a war they'd crumple in two days". This line does not comfort me.

In the summer of 1939, I remember a rash of similar consoling editorials like those of JL Garvin, the old editor of the old Observer who is remembered mainly for the wilting headlines above his articles, the title's always scanned in a famous meter. He wrote one "The crisis in Europe or no war and why". The model for all his headlines was that splendid parody of Bryon, The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, with Edna St Vincent Millay. His editorial came out the week before Hitler went into Poland. Hitler, you may not know all through the summer of 1939 was expertly reported to be desperately short of money and oil.

Last week was it, I mentioned that if you switched on the telly any evening and riffled or stumbled through 72 channels you could be certain of coming on two types of programme whatever was available, every evening not one but several police dramas. Every evening not one but several panels and documentaries and confessionals on Aids. I ought to have added in the past few weeks, a new reliable breast cancer, a new obsession since the surgeon generals department published a conclusion of a 15-year study saying that mammograms given to women in their 40s were a needless procedure, after 50 a necessary precaution, so they have started parades, protest meetings, crusades, women thundering just like the Aids crusaders for many more millions of dollars. Meanwhile, the government does pour many more millions into Aids and now into breast cancer than into any other single affliction.

And meanwhile, one has to acquire a new wave of admiration for the heart disease victims, the multiple sclerotics, the other cancer victims and all the others stricken with a mortal disease who do not march and stomp and scream for the exclusive attention of medical research to their affliction.

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