CONFIDENTIAL
left by these restrictions, nor regard them as a cue for soeking themselves the introduction of similar restrictions
on their own imports. Such a result would not be easy to achieve and we need not minimise the diplomatic effort which
the Americans would need to make,
11. If the Americans should judge that the risks of such a meeting getting out of control outweigh the possible advantages, we should not press them to go to the GATT, in the sense of. calling a meeting. But any arrangement of such importance would in our view have to be at least reported to the GATT.
12.
The above approach provides no occasion either for a
detailed examination in GATT of the statistics and difficulties
of the various sectors of the U.S. textile industry, or for a more general study of the world prospects of textiles in general. On the first point there has perhaps been a misappre- hension current that the GATT has to approve the basis on which a contracting party takes action under Article X1x. This is not the case unless one of the "interested contracting
parties" disagrees with and challenges the action taken. It is true that some purpose might be served if it could be shown
that the sectors of the U.S. industry in which restraints are
sought are in fact in a worse position than comparable sectors
elsewhere. This might lend respectability to the American
action and help to limit the extent to which their example is followed. But we have to recognise that the American problem 18 essentially political. It can be given some kind of GATT cover only by pretending that it is a genuine industrial problem, but this is a pretence which it is unprofitable to examine too closely. Any such examination is only likely to
encourage other countries and industries to discover that they
can produce equally hard cases. If the figures of the U.S. case were to be scrutinised and approved in GATT, the kind of yardstick that might be created would be a highly dangerous instrument. We may, moreover, expect the Americans to be conscious of this and to be anxious to avoid the embarrassment of putting their textile industry under an international microscope. No harm will be done if they themselves explain publicly the peculiar difficulties of those sectors of their
4.