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Liberalization and the Ascendancy of Trade 133

the NTIA and others came under increasing pressure to do something
they were, for the most part, structurally incapable of doing. Out of
crisis, 'free' trade became the centerpiece of US foreign communica-
tion policy. As argued below, its ascent was the direct but complex
outcome of the vacuum left by the collapse of the free flow of
information policy.

6.1 THE FAILURE OF FREE FLOW

In the early 1980s, Reagan administration officials, despite intra-state
opposition, set out to nullify (if not to destroy) those international
agencies where proponents of a New World Information and Com-
munication Order had organized in opposition to the free flow of
information. UNESCO became the primary target. This initiative did
not necessarily imply that the White House was pursuing a well-
conceived reform strategy. While ignoring the advice of officials
from the State Department, the FCC, and even recommendations
from its own appointees to UNESCO, the 1984 withdrawal was not
charted on a larger strategic road map pointing toward a universal
free flow regime through the auspices of free trade. What the Reagan
assault did produce, however, was a policy leadership vacuum, eradic-
ating what had been a generalized and uncoordinated but nevertheless
an occasionally cooperative inter-agency approach to foreign commu-
nication policy. It was in this historical and structural context that the
services trade issue took on its prominent position among US foreign
communication policy officials.
Before the Reagan administration could withdraw the US from
UNESCO and threaten to do the same with the ITU, the conditions
for a domestic rejection of the free flow policy approach first would
emerge. Indeed, in the early 1980s, the strategic weaknesses and intra-
state conflicts associated with the free flow of information approach
became increasingly apparent. Given the growing awareness of the
importance of information-based activities in the international econ-
omy, and the dominant position of US companies in such activities,
foreign nation-state officials understood free flow policy to be almost
entirely based on America's competitive advantages. Because the free
flow 'principle' was widely seen as a ruse calculated to pry open
foreign markets, the arguments made by American officials that free
flow was more fundamentally a human rights issue held little sway in
efforts to generate free flow converts.