Nafta

As a longtime critic of the Clinton administration’s “free trade” agreements, I’ve lately been mocked by liberal friends who suspect I’m sympathetic to the “plan” hatched by Donald Trump and his senior advisor on trade, Peter Navarro, to “ruin” the country with indiscriminate import tariffs. This sort of jokey ridicule goes with the territory when you jab at neoliberalism from the left. Bill Clinton still has legions of fans among the Democratic party establishment and its media acolytes, and it’s hard for them to face up to the fact that the former president’s economic policies have led directly to Trump’s election as president not just once, but twice.

There is a vacant lot at the edge of downtown Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, my hometown. Three years ago, a handsome, sturdy brick factory building stood in that lot, albeit most of the windows were broken, as it had been abandoned for years. After it closed, the building became a favorite hangout for ne’er-do-wells, whose act of arson forced its recent demolition. For decades, though, the clothing factory employed thousands of people and made downtown hum, as workers crowded the restaurants and took care of errands on their lunchbreaks. They – along with the hundreds of people employed by a cigar plant on the outskirts of town – also bought houses and rented properties here and supported locally owned pharmacies, barbers, hardware stores, grocery stores, and the hospital.

Let's not mince words. President Trump and his loyalists were dead right. His threat of tariffs pushed Mexico to work harder to stop the Central American caravans, and the migrants who hope to exploit immigration law loopholes in order to receive asylum in the United States. And the bipartisan, Trump-loathing political, business and media establishments were all dead wrong. They warned that his strong-arming would ignite a trade war, disrupt the thick web of supply chains linking the American and Mexican economies, and risk a recession. Equally off-base was the establishmentarians' angst that Trump's gambit would endanger the revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) that he has sought and which Mexico and Canada recently signed.

As Kamala Harris presents evidence that Brett Kavanaugh habitually exposed himself to several nurses upon being born and then to other females for months, nay, years afterwards, Donald Trump just secured a new trilateral trade deal between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This, friends, is yuge, yuge! The deal replaces, or amends, the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement between the three countries. From the moment he announced his candidacy, way back in 2015, until the day before yesterday, President Trump has assailed the original Nafta as ‘the worst deal ever.’ The fact that US trade with Mexico has gone from a modest surplus in the early years of Nafta to a $68 billion deficit now highlights his concern.