When we think about one country supporting another country we assume that they will want a return on their investment. The U.S. opened it’s economy to Europe and Japan without demanding reciprocity. In the eyes of the U.S, by helping a country grow it would inturn profit America with out direct reimbursement. When the economy of a foreign country prospered they would consume more and require more trade, providing the U.S. with a stimulated economy.
When we look at GATT we look at large countries and small countries. The point of view of the two actors is that by having free trade and low tariffs, they will both benefit. The large countries benefit by the income that trade brings in and smaller countries benefit because their ability to receive affordable good and sell their good at higher prices. But the truth is that the large, productive nations have a great deal to gain with foreign markets lowering tariffs, while poor nations have little to gain when the markets of the wealthy are already dominated by local producers, while their own markets at home are flooded by the wealthy nations.
Not all large countries always benefit, the United States ran into a few problems in its attempts to aid other countries. Countries like Japan were exporting more than they were importing at a drastic rate, and were beginning to dominate the world market. In 1985 Japan was the second largest market economy in the world. Japan had a high savings rate and the U.S. was spending all of its money rather than saving . Japan had a low budget deficit where as the U.S. had a very high budget deficit. The U.S. found itself spread too thin. By attempting to make trade available for everyone the U.S. weakened itself.
In explaining why the United States was having difficulty, we can look at the idea of Mercantilism. Each country is going to have differnet interests, you must be able to anticipoate what a country will do. The U.S. went in with the Liberalistic perspective that alll the countries will enrich each other and that states would be capapble of benefiting the economy. The U.S. should have taken a more Merchantilistic approach, and should have known that all countries are not equal, and they should have anticipated that many of its plans would fail.
It is just very difficult to predict what is going to happen, any argument can be shot down when dealing with social choice. You can predict what you think one country will do based on what they have done in the past, but you can not know for sure. An example is the soldiers dilema; when two soldiers are seperated and intrrogated thay assume that the the one will not talk and vice versa, but because they are seperated they don’t actually know what the other is doing. This example just goes to show that even with the actors hoping to read the other actors, they can never really know what is going to happen, therefor there is no security in GATT or any other system, you just have to allow tha actor to pursue their own intersets and hope they coincide with yours.