Sources say that at a meeting in Washington three weeks ago, the Clinton adviser told Andreas van Agt, the ambassador from the 12-nation European Community (EC), that a trade deal would help Bush and would be viewed by Clinton as interference in U.S. polities. The adviser said, according to the sources, that although Clinton supports free trade in principle, important elements of the deal unacceptable. Van Agt passed the warning along to Jacques Delors, president of the EC Commission in Brussels. “Van Agt sent a long and very excited cable warning about the negative consequences, with both Clinton and the Congress, of making a deal with the Bush administration before the election,” an EC source said in Europe.

“Governor Clinton on a number of occasions has said he supports a successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round,” a senior Clinton foreign-policy adviser said last week. “He’s shown on a number of issues that he understands that we have only one president at a time and that that president makes foreign policy,” the official added. Then who gave the warning to van Agt? “It is also true that in any campaign there are a lot of people who are advisers,” said the official. “Some of these offer their personal opinions, and these get misinterpreted as the views of the campaign or the candidate. I’d be surprised if it were true that whoever talked with van Agt was an emissary for the campaign.”

It was highly unlikely that the Europeans would be able to close a deal with Bush, even if they wanted to, largely because of France’s stubbornness on agricultural-trade issues. The GATT talks have made considerable progress in recent weeks, partly because the administration has been eager for a preelection breakthrough; the negotiations resumed in Toronto last weekend. In addition to cutting tariffs the talks aim for the first time to reduce agricultural barriers and to encourage trade in other areas, notably services. But some tough issues remain, starting with agriculture. France insists that the massive European farm subsidies can be reduced only by what amounts to around 10 percent. The United States and other food producers had demanded that subsidies be phased out by 2000. But with French President Francois Mitterrand’s Socialist Party facing an uphill parliamentary-election fight next March, Paris doesn’t want to alienate farmers. If that deadlock cannot be broken, a final agreement may not be reached until the next U.S. administration-no matter what the threat or who sits in the White House.