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Sure On Monday morning, President Trump held in the Rose Garden of the White House and announced the end of the North American Free Trade Agreement. He had long called the pact – which, in 1994, created a free trade zone in North America – "perhaps the worst trade deal ever concluded." At the press conference, he said the treaty had led to huge trade deficits in the United States. , and the loss of millions of jobs in the manufacturing sector. "For twenty-five years as a civilian, as a businessman, I used to say, 'How could anyone have signed an agreement like this?' NAFTA? "Trump said." Throughout the campaign, I promised to renegotiate NAFTAand today we have kept our promise. The agreement was reached after months of negotiations and a dramatic threat from the United States to let Canada, its second largest trading partner, completely out of this agreement, or to impose tariffs Canadian automobiles. if Canada did not comply with its requirements. Sunday, Canada finally surrendered. The new treaty, Trump announced, would call the US-Mexico-Canada agreement. "It works somehow. . . U.S.M.C.A.! "Trump said. "That sounds good."
The new agreement is not the radical reprint of the NAFTA that Trump had promised. U.S.M.C.A. keeps NAFTAContinental Free Trade Area and most of its provisions, while offering increased benefits to US workers. It requires, for example, that 75% of the components of a car be manufactured in Canada, the United States or Mexico so that the car can benefit from the zero rate. (The old convention provided for 62.5%). Workers earning at least $ 16 an hour must do 40% of the labor required to build the car (instead of 30%). In addition, the new agreement imposes tougher labor requirements in Mexico and could make it easier for workers there to organize (although the extent to which these protections are applied). not clear). Canada has achieved one of its top priorities: preserving Chapter 19, a provision that allows each country to challenge trade restrictions imposed on others before a neutral body. However, the Trump administration was able to force Canada to reduce tariffs on certain categories of dairy products, including milk powder and infant formula. As a columnist for the Canadian news magazine Maclean's wrote: "When your big brother decides to shake you for money for lunch, you can not really do anything."
In the new deal, there is little likely to trigger a ramp-up of manufacturing in the United States, as suggested by Trump. Overall, the U.S.M.C.A. is essentially a reworked version of NAFTA, with improvements on the edges and a new branding. In this respect, it is a classic achievement of Trumpian: it will be a relatively minor change that he will use to win a landslide victory. The business community welcomed the deal, while the unions still did not know how to react – a sign that both groups were aware of Trump's habit of promising to help the workers while producing the most great benefits for large companies. The reaction of the congressional Democrats has been moderate, with some legislators cautiously applauding the improvements brought by the new agreement, others refusing to take a position until they have learned more details.
The idea of a free trade agreement between the United States and Mexico was first introduced in 1990 in a public statement by President George H. W. Bush and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. This marked the beginning of the slow process of international trade negotiations. Canada joined the negotiations the following year. The plan was immediately contentious. In the 1992 presidential election, independent candidate Ross Perot argued that encouraging businesses to buy the country's cheapest labor would give rise to a "huge noise" of Jobs leaving America for Mexico. (Perot won a remarkable nineteen percent vote in the popular vote.) Bush lost the election in favor of Bill Clinton and he quickly signed NAFTA in his lame duck period. It seems that the moment has been pressed to make Clinton's task more difficult – who had subscribed to the idea of a trade pact but wanted more protection for the workers and the environment – for s & d. Interfering in the treaty. Clinton eventually joined the pact and free trade became one of the few subjects on which the Democrats and the traditional democrats seemed to align.
In 1999, during a series of discussions at the World Trade Organization in Seattle, the streets of the city exploded because of the movement of anti-globalization protesters who opposed the emerging economic system embodied by the new W.T.O. and NAFTA. Protesters feared that lower wages and weaker protections for workers in less wealthy countries would hold back US workers and that the flight of manufacturing jobs abroad would leave American communities depressed. They feared that the pact would encourage companies to operate in countries with less stringent environmental regulations, accelerating the destruction of the planet. Above all, they feared that the enormous benefits of the new system would primarily enrich large corporations and their shareholders, and hurt those at the bottom of the scale, resulting in greater economic inequality.
The so-called Battle of Seattle was widely criticized at the time – there were notable outbreaks of violence. But finally, many of the predictions of the demonstrators came true. The wages of American workers stagnated over the next two decades, while employees at the top of the hierarchy grew exponentially. Stable middle-class jobs have declined and have been replaced by less secure and less well-paid forms of employment – the cost of housing, education and health care has skyrocketed. The financial industry in full expansion occupy a disproportionate role in our economy, as the environmental crisis has evolved into a disaster. The two main parties accepted these developments as the status quo, which relegated critics of the new economic order to the political fringe. Incredibly, this allowed Trump to appropriate some of the language of the Seattle protests and to portray himself as the mouthpiece of the working class's resentment of economic inequality. And this has made it difficult for Democrats to challenge it, even as its new deal fails to mitigate most of the damage of globalization.
There are still several crucial steps that the new NAFTA must navigate before it becomes law. The leaders of the three countries must sign the agreement, then their legislature must ratify it. If Democrats take over the House or Senate in the mid-term elections, the treaty would require bipartite approval, which could prove to be a challenge in the current polarized environment. Nevertheless, Trump seems ready to claim a political triumph. Shortly after his photo shoot at Rose Garden, he went to Johnson City, Tennessee, to speak at a campaign rally for Republican Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn. The crowd was filled with fans wearing red hats Make America Great Again. There would have been songs from "Build this Wall" and Trump assured his followers that it was already happening. He then proudly announced the new trade agreement, saying it was "the largest trade deal" ever signed by the United States. The claim was false, but it did not matter. The crowd applauded anyway.
