Trump poised to kill old NAFTA deal
Announcement appears designed to pressure lawmakers in Congress to approve USMCA
WASHINGTON — The original NAFTA deal has landed back atop Donald Trump’s hit list, with the U.S. president again declaring he intends to terminate the 24-year-old trade pact — a move that appears designed to pressure lawmakers on Capitol Hill into approving its recently negotiated successor.
Trump, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former Mexican president Enrique Pena Nieto signed the new U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement — USMCA, although the federal government in Ottawa has rechristened it CUSMA — during an awkward ceremony at the outset of G20 meetings Friday in Argentina.
Trump was on board Air Force One on his way back to Washington late Saturday when he announced that he would notify Congress of his intention to terminate NAFTA, a longthreatened move that would give lawmakers six months to approve its replacement once formal notice is delivered.
“I will be formally terminating NAFTA shortly,” the president said of the trilateral agreement he and his supporters have long loved to hate.
“I’ll be terminating it within a relatively short period of time. We get rid of NAFTA. It’s been a disaster for the United States. It’s caused us tremendous amounts of unemployment
and loss and company loss and everything else. That’ll be terminated.
“And so Congress will have a choice of the USMCA or pre-NAFTA, which worked very well. You got out, you negotiate your deals. It worked very well.”
A number of Democrats in Congress, empowered by their new majority in the House of Representatives, say they don’t much like the new agreement in its current form either, and say they won’t support it without more stringent enforcement mechanisms for new labour rules and environmental protection.
Some Republicans say they, too, are disinclined to support the agreement in its current form.
Kristin Dziczek, vice-president of industry, labour and economics at the Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, was not surprised to hear of Trump’s decision, something he threatened several times during negotiations in an effort to spur progress and curry favour with supporters.
“I don’t think it’s a bluff,” Dziczek said Sunday. “I think that’s how he thinks he’s going to whip votes.”
Dziczek said she’s anticipates a scenario where Trump signs a formal intent to withdraw, but ignores the fact that congressional approval would be required to repeal the underlying legislation that enforces the terms of the original agreement — a scenario she’s dubbed “zombie NAFTA.”
“I think it’s really, really likely we end up in that situation,” she said. “Without this, he’s got little leverage over Congress, and Congress has got detractors on both sides — on the Democrat and the Republican side — who don’t really like the deal.”
Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and one of more than a dozen names believed to be eyeing a presidential run in 2020, has added her name to the list of lawmakers who say they won’t support the new agreement.
“As it’s currently written, Trump’s deal won’t stop the serious and ongoing harm NAFTA causes for American workers. It won’t stop outsourcing, it won’t raise wages, and it won’t create jobs. It’s NAFTA 2.0,” Warren told a luncheon audience last week during a speech in Washington.
She cited a lack of enforcement tools for labour standards, drug company “handouts” and a lack of sufficiently robust measures to cut pollution or combat climate change, particularly in Mexico — and her refusal to use the deal’s new name hinted at precisely why Trump wants to do away with the old one.
“For these reasons, I oppose NAFTA 2.0, and will vote against it in the Senate unless President Trump reopens the agreement and produces a better deal for America’s working families.”