The representatives from Canada and Mexico who came to Washington on Wednesday to discuss the North American Free Trade Agreement were greeted by U.S. officials taking a hard line on negotiations.
“We cannot ignore the huge trade deficits, the lost manufacturing jobs, the businesses that have closed or moved, because of incentives, intended or not, in the current agreement,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said. “The U.S. government has certified that at least 700,000 Americans have lost their jobs due to changing trade flows resulting from NAFTA.”
Lighthizer cautioned: “I want to be clear that [Trump] is not interested in a mere tweaking of a few provisions and a couple of updated chapters. We feel that NAFTA has fundamentally failed many, many Americans and needs major improvement.”
Officials from Canada and Mexico took a far more muted tone, calling for negotiations to reflect the “neighborly, collegial” friendship between the three nations and emphasizing the need to “modernize” NAFTA to secure “a win-win-win for all three countries.”
“Since its enforcement, NAFTA has been more than a trade agreement. It has made us think of ourselves as a region,” Mexican Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal said. “The issue is not tearing apart what has worked, but rather how we can make the agreement work better.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, NAFTA was one of Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags. The candidate regularly called it “the worst trade deal in history” and promised he would “rip it up” if elected “to get a better deal for our workers.”
But improving NAFTA won’t be as easy as tearing it up. Even if U.S. negotiators are able to secure a deal Trump finds satisfactory, Trump will still have to sell the agreement to a divided Congress that has yet to deliver on many of the president’s priorities,.
“This whole business of renegotiating NAFTA was a campaign pledge in search of a constituency,” Scott Miller of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told Politico. “No business community member, no enterprise, no farm group ever asked for this.”
Meanwhile, labor groups are watching the negotiations closely.
All panelists agree #NAFTA renegotiations must be transparent & INCLUDE workers & community mbrs negatively impacted by current policy. pic.twitter.com/JvOmGwFnoO
— United Steelworkers (@steelworkers) August 16, 2017
