Obama Reverses Campaign Pledge to Renegotiate NAFTA
President Obama has wrapped up a two-day visit to Mexico for talks with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The three leaders met in Guadalajara to discuss issues including immigration reform, trade, Mexico's drug war, the crisis in Honduras, and the swine flu outbreak. It was Obama's first official summit under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. On the campaign trail, Obama had promised to open up NAFTA to renegotiations. But he's backed off that pledge since taking office, blaming the global economic meltdown. Ref. Source 5
NAFTA - North American Free Trade Agreement (Hover)
I can never understand how building highways to get communities closer together should be the means to destroy communities in the process.
International Level: Junior Politician / Political Participation: 67 6.7%
President Donald Trump said today he will begin renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement when he meets with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.
A central promise of Trump's campaign was that he would revamp the 23-year-old trade pact.
At a White House event, Trump said he had scheduled meetings with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Ref. CNN.
President Donald Trump told the leaders of Canada and Mexico Wednesday he was not immediately planning to end the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact which he railed against as a candidate and as recently as last week declared was harmful to US workers.
In a description of Trump's phone calls to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Enrique Peña Nieto, the White House said Trump "Agreed not to terminate NAFTA at this time and the leaders agreed to proceed swiftly, according to their required internal procedures, to enable the renegotiation of the NAFTA deal to the benefit of all three countries."
"It is my privilege to bring NAFTA up to date through renegotiation," Trump said in a written statement that accompanied the readout of his phone calls. "It is an honor to deal with both President Peña Nieto and Prime Minister Trudeau, and I believe that the end result will make all three countries stronger and better."
The White House said the phone conversations were "Pleasant and productive." Ref. CNN.
Good, we shouldn't just arbitrarily leave an agreement we signed with our two nearest neighbors and largest trading partners. Has NAFTA had its bad points, yes. Has it had some unintended consequences, of course. But rather than just scrap it and hurt our relations with both Canada and Mexico, we should sit down and renegotiate it. We can improve it and make it better for all of us. And even then it'll have unintended consequences five, ten, fifteen years down the road. So we should also out in a clause to go back and revisit it with our friends to the north and south every five to ten years.
Usually any trade agreement will have things that are good and bad for each other. We will have to wait and see what they come up with this time. But yes having a option to renegotiate every few years is a good.