Robert Lighthizer was the public face of arduous, year-long talks to rework NAFTA, but as he savoured a successful conclusion in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, the US trade representative singled out another man as the deal\u2019s architect.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve said before, and I\u2019ll say again, this agreement would not have happened if it wasn\u2019t for Jared,\u201d Lighthizer told reporters.<\/p>\n
The 70-year-old veteran negotiator was referring to Jared Kushner, more than 30 years his junior and Donald Trump\u2019s son-in-law, whom the president had asked to help out on trade early in the presidency, especially on Canada and Mexico.<\/p>\n
While Kushner\u2019s time in the White House has been turbulent Chief of Staff John Kelly temporarily stripped him of his security clearance earlier this year and he has been criticized for his dealings with the Middle East his role in keeping the North American Trade Agreement afloat was fundamental, multiple sources said.<\/p>\n
A 37-year-old real estate tycoon married to Trump\u2019s daughter Ivanka, Kushner has the trust of his father-in-law, and crucially, is close to Lighthizer, a Canadian source with knowledge of the talks said.<\/p>\n
His friendship with Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray, whom he knows from Wall Street, helped diffuse several blowups in that relationship and get a US-Mexican deal over the finish line in August, another source close to the talks said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe deal fell apart more than once. And in every occasion it was one person that always found a way to put it back together: Jared Kushner,\u201d Videgaray told Reuters.<\/p>\n
A second Canadian source said Telford and Butts flew to Washington to meet Kushner in the early days of the presidency.<\/p>\n
Those connections came to the fore again last week, when the mood became toxic between Lighthizer and Freeland, as the US-imposed Sept. 30 deadline to conclude the talks loomed.<\/p>\n
A third Canadian source directly familiar with the talks said the Americans \u201cwere incensed\u201d when Freeland took part in a Toronto panel entitled \u201cTaking on the Tyrant,\u201d which featured derogatory comments about Trump, following an earlier speech criticizing US trade policy.<\/p>\n
Trump summed up the atmosphere in typically blunt fashion, saying on Wednesday, \u201cWe don\u2019t like their representative very much,\u201d as the Canadian negotiating team dug in on the politically sensitive issue of US access to Canada\u2019s dairy market.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a moment where the traditional channels of negotiations appeared to break down because they just could not get through some of the largest issues, dairy being one of them,\u201d said a person in Washington familiar with the situation.<\/p>\n
Kushner kept talking to Butts and Telford, and on Thursday a message got through that the United States wanted to know what was non-negotiable for Canada. The answer went back that Chapter 19, a dispute resolution mechanism, was a red line.<\/p>\n
By Friday morning it was clear that the Trump administration was not going to fight for Chapter 19 anymore \u201cthe Americans blinked,\u201d said a fourth senior Canadian source with direct knowledge of the talks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think the administration itself was that hung up on19, I think Robert Lighthizer was,\u201d Yussuff said.<\/p>\n
The breakthrough triggered concessions from Trudeau\u2019s team, most importantly on dairy. The fourth Canadian source described the thinking as \u201cbetter get dairy out of the way now\u201d rather than negotiating from a weaker position if talks failed and Trump hit them with 25 per cent auto tariffs, the stick he had used to hurry along talks with Mexico and Canada since May.<\/p>\n
On Friday, Kushner got Lighthizer on a conference call with Telford and Butts. \u201cTogether the four of them worked through some of the outstanding issues and that led to a breakthrough in the negotiations, ultimately leading to the success of the deal,\u201d said the person in Washington.<\/p>\n
With a deal in sight, Mexico and the United States cancelled plans to publish on Friday evening the text of their bilateral deal to give Canada the chance to join by the Sunday deadline.<\/p>\n
The talks intensified, with Telford \u201ctalking on the phone the entire time,\u201d in the end with Kushner, said the fourth Canadian source.<\/p>\n
The offices of Freeland and Trudeau did not respond to requests for comment. The White House declined to comment.<\/p>\n
It was by no means a foregone conclusion that NAFTA would survive. After demanding early last year that it be reworked in favour of the United States, Trump repeatedly threatened to toss in the trash the $1.2 trillion, quarter-century-old agreement.<\/p>\n
Tensions between the United States and Canada started at the top, with relations strained between Trump and Trudeau after acrimonious talks in Quebec City in June at a G7 summit.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of tension, I will say, between he and I I think, more specifically,\u201d Trump told a news conference on Monday. \u201cAnd it\u2019s all worked out. You know when it ended? About 12 o\u2019clock last night.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lighthizer, speaking on Monday, said, \u201cIf you\u2019re not willing to walk away from an agreement, you cannot get one,\u201d holding his hands up to his head to describe how intense Trump had been on trade.<\/p>\n
Trump changed his mind, according to one source close to the talks, only after his agriculture minister, Sonny Perdue, showed the president a map including all the Trump-supporting, farming states that would suffer lost exports if NAFTA collapsed.<\/p>\n
Similarly, there was more to bringing the talks to a last-minute finale than just Kushner\u2019s efforts. Outside factors were also pushing all sides toward a deal.<\/p>\n
In the weeks following the announcement of the Mexico-US deal, US and Mexican officials increasingly understood a new trade accord might not pass Congress without Canada on board, said one US-based source familiar with the process.<\/p>\n
Anxious to avoid the risk of being left with nothing, Videgaray and Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo, Mexico\u2019s lead in the negotiations, worked behind the scenes to \u201ctriangulate\u201d communication between the Canadians and the Americans to try to \u201cland\u201d the deal, the source said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Robert Lighthizer was the public face of arduous, year-long talks to rework NAFTA, but as he savoured a successful conclusion in the White House Rose Garden on Monday, the US trade representative singled out another man as the deal\u2019s architect. \u201cI\u2019ve said before, and I\u2019ll say again, this agreement would not have happened if it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":43550,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43549","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\/43549","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=43549"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43551,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43549\/revisions\/43551"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}