Now It's Revamp, Not Replace

The Trump administration’s stated goals in renegotiating the three-nation Nafta trade pact are surprisingly modest.

- Peter Coy, Andrew Mayeda, Josh Wingrove, and Eric Martin

Donald Trump has gone squishy by stages on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he once called “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere.” In April, aides persuaded him not to abrogate the 23-year-old trade pact with Canada and Mexico. On July 17, moderates scored another victory: The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released objectives for renegotiating Nafta that aim to tune it up, not gut it. “Overall this looks like a Nafta modernization. It’s not like the whole of Nafta is up for grabs,” says Antonio OrtizMena, a senior adviser at Albright Stonebridge Group, a Washington diplomacy advisory firm, who previously headed the economic affairs section of the Mexican Embassy.

Even after Trump relented last spring on killing the three-way pact, some analysts expected he would direct U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to take a hard, nationalistic line in talks on updating it. After all, in January the president had threatened a 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods to pay for the border wall. There are no such threats in the trade rep’s letter to Congress spelling out the administration’s objectives. The administration is OK with maintaining tariff-free, quota-free trade among the three countries.