President Bush once remarked that they don't "do nuance" in Texas, and the same might be said for the hot-button issues in the presidential election. But while the issues of peace and prosperity offer clear contrasts, the differences are more subtle in trade policy. The record shows that neither candidate can be as easily pigeon-holed as their rhetoric might suggest. President Bush calls for open markets, but has also extended protection to steel, textile, and sugar producers. And, while Senator Kerry hopes to capitalize on the controversy over outsourcing, he has a fairly consistent record of voting for NAFTA and other trade agreements.

The differences between the Bush and Kerry approaches to trade are matters of detail. No matter who wins this election, the United States is likely to negotiate more agreements to reduce trade barriers. The main differences concern the partners they would pick for negotiations and the issues they would emphasize.

Bilateral and regional free trade agreements (FTAs) are the most partisan aspect of U.S. trade policy today. Ever since the United States began negotiating FTAs in the 1980s, most of these agreements have been politically sensitive. Both candidates favor the intrinsic value of FTAs, which reduce foreign barriers to U.S. exports. Where they differ is in the extrinsic values of agreements. For the Bush administration, FTAs are useful tools of foreign policy. For Kerry, these pacts should be judged on their consequences for labor rights and environmental protection.

The United States has initiated FTA negotiations with twenty countries since Bush took office, nearly all of which correspond to two objectives in foreign policy. One set of agreements is intended to promote U.S. goals in the Middle East. Some agreements are with Middle Eastern countries themselves-the administration has completed negotiations with Morocco and Bahrain-and others are with countries that have joined the "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq. These include all seven Latin American countries in the coalition (three of which sent troops), as well as Australia and Thailand.

The Bush administration has also used FTAs as a means of influencing the multilateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Those talks stalled last year when a group of developing countries opposed a joint U.S.-European position on agricultural trade. By offering FTAs to some of these erstwhile opponents, the U.S. negotiators convinced six countries to defect from what was once the Group of 20.

While Democrats have also used FTAs as diplomatic leverage-see the Clinton administration's FTA with Jordan, for example-they place much greater emphasis on the social impact of these agreements. Kerry would be less likely than Bush to negotiate FTAs with low-wage developing countries, and much more insistent that these agreements include enforceable standards on labor rights and environmental protection.

Kerry calls for a 120-day review of trade agreements to examine their labor and environment effects. It is unlikely that this review would lead to the abrogation of any existing agreements, but any agreements that are waiting on the president's desk will be closely scrutinized. These include some FTAs that the Bush administration has already negotiated but not yet sent to Congress, especially the FTA with Central America and the Dominican Republic. Several other agreements might be completed, or nearly so, by Inauguration Day. That 120-day review could produce decisions to reject or (more likely) renegotiate these pacts. There is precedent for renegotiation: this is what Clinton did to the NAFTA that it inherited from Bush I, and what Bush II did to the Jordan FTA that it inherited from Clinton.

Compared to FTAs, the multilateral trade negotiations are a more bipartisan initiative. The Doha Round of WTO negotiations aims to cut or eliminate tariffs and subsidies, reduce barriers to trade in services, and deal with a range of other issues. These negotiations were launched in 2001 and were supposed to be completed by the end of 2004, but will carry on into the next administration.

Although the Doha Round started under Bush, there is no reason to expect that a Kerry administration would scuttle these negotiations. In fact, both of the last two multilateral negotiations were started under a Republican president and completed by a Democratic successor: the Tokyo Round (1972-1979) lasted from the Nixon to the Carter administrations, while the Uruguay Round (1986-1994) started under Reagan and was completed by Clinton. A Kerry administration might not approach the end-game of the negotiations in the same way as a Bush administration, depending on the industries that it favors and the strategy that it selects. Kerry might take a softer line on intellectual property protection for AIDS drugs, for example, but take an even harder line against changing U.S. antidumping laws.

These are matters of nuance, however, and trade policy is one area where all presidents are obliged to do nuance.