The NAFTA reboot could be Trump's greatest victory

The USMCA is already better than NAFTA. Will Democrats ever learn to love it?

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Library of Congress, SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

The seriousness of the possible end of the North American Free Trade Agreement cannot be overstated. It is far more consequential than the public and private fortunes of a Supreme Court nominee who should have been withdrawn weeks ago. The ratification of NAFTA in 1994 over the protests of virtually every labor union in the country changed the United States forever. It exacerbated the decline of industrial America and began the remaking of the rest of the world in the image of deracinated neoliberalism. Along with George W. Bush's awarding of "Most Favored Nation" status to China, it cemented seemingly for good the economic trends — the decrease in real wages, the end of lifetime employment, the decline of union power outside the public sector — that since the Carter administration had been transforming the United States from a mixed economy with quasi-nationalized industries and a strong welfare state to a libertarian-lite corporate dystopia.

President Trump's NAFTA-replacing deal with Canada and Mexico is very new. It is impossible in the space of only a day or two to review its proposed language, which runs to many thousands of words on every conceivable subject on which the interests of two or more of the member countries might intersect. There are four-page PDFs ("Subject to Legal Review for Accuracy, Clarity, and Consistency; Subject to Language Authentication") reproducing correspondence between the Mexican economic secretary and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, expressing tentative agreement on the consequences of pan-American cross-marketing of some 25 different varieties of cheese. The whole thing is head-spinningly complicated and emphatically not the sort of thing about which cheap moralizing journalism can be produced.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.