For all the furor over Trump’s futile efforts to get his party to fall in line, his basic challenge was that Obamacare wasn’t really horrific, and his sugary promises to replace it with something awesome for everyone weren’t really realistic.
The administration’s draft letter on renegotiating NAFTA reflects similar challenges. For example, Trump has complained that one of the biggest deficiencies of the deal is its failure to address currency issues, but not one of the letter’s 49 goals for improving it mentions currency issues. There was also nothing about requiring the new NAFTA to reduce U.S. trade deficits, something White House trade adviser Peter Navarro had suggested would be necessary in any U.S. trade deal.
Instead, the letter suggests that the overarching purpose of the renegotiations should merely be modernizing NAFTA to deal with issues that didn’t exist when it went into effect, and strengthening it to reflect the standards in more recent U.S. trade deals. “For example, digital trade was in its infancy in 1994,” the letter says. “Labor and environment were an afterthought to the Agreement.” The eight-page draft also cites intellectual property rights, state-owned enterprises, and trade in services as areas where NAFTA ought to be updated to reflect 21st-century realities.
Well, guess what? After years of intense negotiations, the Obama administration already finalized a deal in which Canada and Mexico accepted new protections for digital trade, tougher labor and environmental safeguards, stronger intellectual property rules, new limits on state-owned enterprises, and freer trade in services like law, consulting, accounting and wealth management where U.S. firms tend to excel. But that deal was the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Asia-oriented trade agreement that Trump scuttled on his third day in office. Several former Obama aides pointed out that despite Trump’s attacks on TPP as an existential threat to the United States, much of his administration’s list of goals sounded like a rehash of TPP’s achievements.
“A lot of it looks very familiar,” says Wendy Cutler, who oversaw the TPP talks as Obama’s deputy U.S. trade representative.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said last week that the letter is just a draft, and does not reflect current administration policy. But there have been numerous signs that Trump’s aides do not share his view of TPP as an irredeemable mess. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross have both suggested the concessions that Mexico and Canada made in TPP could be “the starting point” for renegotiating NAFTA. “We’re obviously not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Ross said.
The problem is, Trump may have done just that when he killed TPP. The U.S. did not have to give up much to Canada or Mexico in exchange for those earlier concessions, because Canada and Mexico were eager for increased access to Asian markets through TPP. But that is not something the U.S. can offer through revisions to NAFTA. And the draft letter to Congress suggested the Trump administration will also seek big additional concessions, like a more level playing field on border taxes, a revised dispute settlement process, new “rules of origin” with advantages for U.S. factories, and new advantages for U.S. contractors in government procurement.
Source:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/sto...amacare-214979
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Originally Posted by paralleluniverse
Folly and fakery have always been with us... but it has never before been as dangerous as it is now, never in history have we been able to afford it less. - Isaac Asimov
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