After nafta

The challenges of international negotiations with a reality-tv star

The challenges of international negotiations with a reality-tv star

In September, just a few weeks before the revised North American Free Trade Agreement was signed, Chrystia Freeland walked onto a Toronto stage to a standing ovation. The Canadian foreign-affairs minister was the star of a panel criticizing populist politics and “authoritarian strong men.” This event, dubbed Taking on the Tyrant, cast Freeland as the feminist hero fighting a crass, pussy-grabbing villain. It also helped send a clear political message — one Ottawa wanted to broadcast over its months-long, contentious talks with the United States to replace the original twenty-four-year-old NAFTA: by standing up to a bully, Freeland was protecting the values of our liberal, multicultural democracy and, indeed, our very Canadianness. The NAFTA talks weren’t a renegotiation of a trading partnership as much as a show of power — a reminder, on the world stage, of which country has the most of it. Trump had made reforming NAFTA an issue on his 2016 presidential campaign, a dramatic show of his ultra-businessman brand, and a key pillar of his closed-borders, America-first, MAGA view of the world. His reality-tv style of politics, however, pushed negotiations with Canada and Mexico beyond the financial arguments that undergird the normal give and take of competing interests and into outright fake news. There was little acknowledgment by Trump, for example, that withdrawing from NAFTA would put the US economy in serious jeopardy. Or that, as of 2016, US trade was responsible for 41 million jobs, accounting for 22 percent of the country’s employment. Unlike during past trade talks, in other words, Canada wasn’t merely grappling with tough negotiators or divisive demands but with someone who claimed he was ready to walk away entirely if he didn’t get his way. In more than a year of bargaining, Canada and the US increasingly leaned into a near-cartoonish stereotype of themselves: the US bombastic and bullying; Canada measured, civil. In one representative June volley, for example, Trump tweeted that Justin Trudeau was “very dishonest” and “weak.” The following week,

Freeland nodded back to Trump in her acceptance speech for Foreign Policy’s Diplomat of the Year award. “You may feel today that your size allows you to go mano-a-mano with your traditional adversaries and be guaranteed to win,” she told a Washington crowd. “But if history tells us one thing, it is that no one nation’s preeminence is eternal.” And so it went. Trump, in a consistent evasion of cooperation, continued to maintain that NAFTA was “one of the worst Trade Deals ever made” and that a sneaky Canada had taken advantage of the superpower for decades. Canada continued to insist he was wrong and told media that it would not back down. At the outset of the talks, Trudeau and his team had declared they would lobby for a progressive, modern deal — one that exemplified Canadian values. They initially demanded environmental protections, fortification of Indigenous and women’s rights, plus stronger labour standards. But how to achieve any of it under Trump’s radically different priorities, never mind his stunning disregard for the long economic reliance between the two countries? Much of Ottawa’s agenda fell by the wayside as it became clearer that Trump wanted, above all, not to reach a mutually beneficial deal but to win. “This was adefensive negotiation from the get-go for Canada,” says Christopher Kukucha, a political-science professor at the University of Lethbridge. “There was no real room for us to pursue offensive interests.” Like others, Kukucha emphasizes that this is not a fault of the Canadian negotiating team, which doggedly worked to preserve NAFTA’S most important details in reaching a new deal, since renamed the United States-mexico-canada Agreement (USMCA). What’s worrisome to him isn’t the deal per se but how Trump set the agenda for the negotiations. Kukucha stresses that Canada cannot allow its defensive position with the recent trade talks to set a tone for how it will go into such negotiations in the future. Yet that battle might already be lost — and not just by Trudeau, Freeland, and company. If the NAFTA power struggle has taught trade observers around the world anything so far, it’s that successful diplomacy in the age of Trump means not losing too much of what you already have.

From an economic standpoint, at least, the new trilateral deal is not a significant triumph or an alarming loss for any of the countries that signed it; in many ways, it’s very nearly the same agreement we had before, and particularly so from a Canadian lens. USMCA largely reflects the incremental progress that’s been a hallmark of Canada’s foreign-trade policies for decades. Political and trade-policy experts who spoke to The Walrus all agreed that, after the Americans’ repeated threats to withdraw from NAFTA, the big win for us is that an agreement exists at all. While it’s too soon to predict what long-term effects the USMCA will have on Canada’s economy, in the short term, we might even cheer that Canada stood fairly firm footed on certain provisions from the 1994 NAFTA: the issue of auto tariffs and Chapter 19, an essential dispute-resolution mechanism. It’s worth remembering that Canada-us relations have been in tense frenemy territory before, often because of trade policy. Protectionism on the American side and anti-americanism on the Canadian side marred the talks before the Canada-us Free Trade Agreement, negotiated in the late 1980s as a precursor to NAFTA. One member of the Canadian team at the time wrote later that the Americans had the habit of “never being more indignant than when they were dead wrong,” adding at another point that they had “a belief that they have a mandate to receive, but not to make concessions.” Like in the recent talks that led to the creation of the USMCA, the two countries didn’t reach consensus until shortly before the midnight deadline and after previous relations had completely broken down. Anticipating a negative outcome, Ottawa had, in fact, already prepared a press release announcing the failure of the negotiations. Canada got its deal in the ’90s by following the same safe (and not particularly aggressive) tactic it would later use in this year’s escalating trade talks: gain small wins, bit by bit, cautiously and pragmatically. When it comes to Canadian trade policy, big demands are often seen as unlikely to succeed and not worth the potential fallout. Then, as now, Canada played a strategy of compromise, an approach that, while necessary, can come with its own price: defensive concessions. “The principal foreign policy challenge for Canada,” wrote one researcher in a POST-NAFTA International Journal paper, “is to manage the forces of silent integration drawing us ever closer to our giant neighbour and to obtain maximum benefit from that integration.” The question now isn’t whether Canada maintained maximum benefit this go around but if it ever had a chance to do so — and whether USMCA has ushered in a lopsided framework for foreign policy. It’s not inconceivable to imagine a near future in which world leaders will abandon economics entirely when it comes to measuring the success of their own trade deals with the US. Already, Trump has approached his partnerships with other countries in the same grandiose manner he used when negotiating with Canada, redefining any trade talks as an expression of his personality: antagonistic, extreme, and theatrical. In late August, Trump called the EU “Almost as bad as China, just smaller,” adding that the World Trade Organization “is the single worst trade deal ever made.” (The WTO , it should be said, is technically not a trade deal). In fact, just days after the USMCA was signed, Trump indicated that the EU and Japan were next on his trade hit list. Seeming to brag that his truculent style won a better deal with the USMCA, an emboldened Trump derided all the “babies out there” — including members of his own Congress — who worried about the effects of tariffs on the world economy. In the meantime, Canada, and the rest of the world, will have to reckon with what it means when mere survival against the US can feel like a victory.