The first round of talks takes place from August 16-20 in Washington.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump will have the chance to turn a key campaign promise into reality with this week\u2019s start of official talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.<\/p>\n
After threatening during the campaign to rip up the agreement, Trump has softened his stance a bit and spoken more recently of renegotiating the agreement as the most efficient course for the US, Canada and Mexico.<\/p>\n
But talks to redo the controversial 1994 agreement, which eliminated trade barriers among the three countries, are expected to be thorny. The first round takes place from Wednesday to Sunday in the US capital.<\/p>\n
Trump made NAFTA a defining issue of his campaign, frequently lambasting the deal as a \u201cdisaster\u201d that sold out US workers and dismissing supporters who touted the deal\u2019s benefits.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Donald Trump this was so central in his campaign that he felt he has no choice but proceed,\u201d said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, a leading think tank.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think at some point the President Trump has to walk away with something that he can call victory. I don\u2019t think he could just walk away.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s biggest gripe with NAFTA has been the dramatic shift in the US\u2019 commercial balance with Mexico, which since the treaty\u2019s inception has gone from a surplus of $1.3 billion to a deficit of $64 billion.<\/p>\n
NAFTA has been a bedrock of the Mexican economy, with 80% of that country\u2019s exports going to its Northern neighbor, an especially impactful relationship for Mexican manufacturers and farmers.<\/p>\n
The agreement has significantly boosted Mexico\u2019s auto sector, which has grown because of its supply of cheap labor as US automakers have shuttered some factories in their home country.<\/p>\n
Too many Americans have been hurt by closed factories, exported jobs, and broken political promises,\u201d US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said last month.<\/p>\n
The US trade balance with Canada is more even, but that trade relationship also has points of tension in some sectors, including dairy, wine and grains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first round of talks takes place from August 16-20 in Washington. President Donald Trump will have the chance to turn a key campaign promise into reality with this week\u2019s start of official talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. After threatening during the campaign to rip up the agreement, Trump has softened […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2023,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2022"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2024,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions\/2024"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}