NEWS ANALYSIS : What Arms Talks Were in Cold War, Trade Talks Are Now : Economy: The spotlight on GATT negotiations is a result of heightened U.S. awareness--that security depends on exports fueling job growth.

WASHINGTON — The negotiations are almost always in neutral cities, preferably those with four-star hotels and restaurants--places like Geneva. The talks go on for years and ultimately grow so complex that only a handful of professional negotiators fully understand all their minutiae.

Each government makes demands that often sound petty or silly to outside observers, but insiders convince themselves that national security hangs in the balance. Ultimately, the results of the talks do make a difference in relations between the world’s major powers.

Twenty years ago, that described the Cold War era’s most important international negotiations--U.S.-Soviet arms talks. But in today’s post-Cold War era, in which economic security issues dominate the international agenda, trade has supplanted arms as the critical point of contention between nations.

Indeed, as the world this week watches and waits for results from Geneva of arcane negotiations under the umbrella of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the talks have emerged from years of obscurity onto the front pages of newspapers around the world.

The increased importance and visibility of international trade negotiations is clearly the result of a deeper trend: The economies of the major industrial powers have become more intertwined than ever.

While trade has long been seen as a big issue in Japan and Western Europe, the difference today is the result of a heightened awareness of trade in the United States.

“As long as you had a potentially mortal threat from the Soviet Union, you had to put top priority on deterring it,” observed Fred Bergsten, founder of the Institute for International Economics in Washington and an outside adviser to the Clinton Administration. “But once that threat was eliminated--and given the fact the economy had just gone through 20 years of difficulties--the time had really come to get back to basics and focus on economics.”

American government and industry no longer can count on the domestic market to support rapid economic growth--so exports have become critical to job creation.

“Trade and trade negotiations were always important. It is just that their importance has become more evident in the United States, now that their significance is no longer hidden by Cold War security concerns,” said John Zysman, director of the Berkeley Roundtable on International Economics at UC Berkeley.

Trade began to re-emerge from its Cold War shadow under former President George Bush. But it has been President Clinton who has done the most to bring it into the limelight.

When he entered office last January, Clinton still clung to traditional Democratic ambivalence about the importance of trade to the United States. A year later, he is an ardent advocate of free trade, pushing the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress, working with Japan on bilateral trade issues and now pushing to complete a far broader GATT accord.

Clinton’s heightened interest in trade negotiations connects to their effect on American jobs. Clinton ran for President on the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid.” And he never suggested that dictum was limited to domestic affairs.

A few basic statistics make the point of the new importance of trade to American jobs: 75% of U.S. manufactured goods are now either exported or subject to foreign competition; more than 30% of U.S. farm acreage is now planted for crops that are exported, and exports now make up a larger part of the U.S. economy than do new-car sales or new-home sales.

If there were any lingering doubts about the Administration’s commitment to elevating trade and economics on the foreign agenda, Secretary of State Warren Christopher dispelled them earlier this month when he went to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Brussels to talk about the importance of a GATT accord to U.S. interests.

“You had all these NATO (security policy) wonks sitting there, and they were stunned that he was talking to them about GATT,” observed State Department spokesman Mike McCurry. “In a sense, that really upped the ante on the GATT negotiations.”

For most of the long U.S.-Soviet stalemate, America had the luxury of submerging its international economic interests beneath military concerns because the United States was the only economic superpower.

Often, American officials felt they could accept trade deals that were more favorable to our rivals, because U.S. officials were more concerned with keeping their trading partners on their side in the Cold War than they were about putting U.S. business interests at a disadvantage.

“A lot of our trading partners used to roll us in trade negotiations by using the old ploy that the Commies were coming,” noted Carol Brookins, founder and president of World Resources, an international agriculture research firm based in Washington.

But the emergence of Japan and Germany as economic powers and the rise of new Asian industrial nations like South Korea and China have eliminated America’s dominance in international markets. And so today, details of trade deals like GATT really do matter, just as the details of arms treaties did during the Cold War.

“The point that needs to be made over and over again is that the American hegemony is over and we must learn that trade negotiations matter a lot,” noted Alan Tonelson, research director of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington. “We are not talking about nuclear war, but the stakes have become very high because the future of U.S. economic security is at stake.”