Does NAFTA II Have a Future?

The trilateral trade summit in Washington has the oracles speculating that free trade among Mexico, the US and Canada may be less than healthy.

Trudeau's failure to persuade Americans to ease up on Canada in a landmark electric-vehicle plan capped a visit that served a long, loud wake-up call to this new reality.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump's protectionist impulses were no aberration: this era is vastly different from the one that produced the 1965 Auto Pact and spurred decades of Canada-U.S. economic integration.

While prime minister Trudeau was giving a speech hyping our special relationship, Joe Biden made an appearance in Detroit where he told auto workers that his made-in-America policies stand.

Biden called this an inflection point in history, comparing the globe to a chessboard where all the old pieces are moving around; he predicted future generations will ask a question about our time: Did the United States compete with China?

That fear of losing pervades nearly everything in Washington — lost economic power, lost manufacturing capacity, lost military supremacy.

Collateral Damage

When American politicians talk about this continent or their borders, it's usually about concerns involving Mexico.

Their worries involve migration coming from the south, and manufacturing jobs going to the south.

In fact, those fears are one reason Americans are so hesitant to tinker with Biden's vehicle plan: One goal of this tax credit is to steer assembly plants back from Mexico — and it's hard to exempt one U.S. neighbour, but not the other.

It's hard to see how these regional or global trading pacts will weather the climate crisis. That's a problem that causes nations to become inward looking, focused on their own wellbeing and stability. Globalism depends on high levels of stability and commitment among multiple trading partners and long supply chains. Those prerequisites are now showing the strain.
 
While the climate emergency is global, it's anything but uniformly experienced. Some countries are far more vulnerable than others. In some regions, rivalries can trigger conflicts internally and with the neighbours. These are not conditions conducive to globalism. If anything, they're an incentive for every nation to rank its own interests a bit higher.



Comments

  1. TrailblazerNovember 19, 2021 at 6:14 PM

    The USA loves globalism until it does not work to their advantage.
    They never could win a softwood lumber argument at the WTO.
    Hence softwood was never in NAFTA or it's funny acronym successor.
    That so many in Canada still wish for the American dream beats me!!
    Time to distance ourselves from the elephant ( in more ways than one) !

    TB

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Disaffected LibNovember 20, 2021 at 12:21 PM

      We've allowed our economy to become so deeply integrated with America's, gaining back a bit of our sovereignty won't be easy or painless.

      Delete

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