Trump and the New Nafta

Trump and the new NAFTA

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/us/politics/nafta-deal-trump-canada-mexico.html?

Revised Nafta sets up a showdown with China. NYT: “A jubilant Mr. Trump celebrated the new Nafta agreement as the fulfillment of a bedrock campaign promise. He claimed it was a vindication of his aggressive use of tariffs and vowed to keep imposing them to extract deals from other trading partners, like the European Union and Japan. The updated Nafta, which will be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A., represents Mr. Trump’s biggest trade achievement to date, and it comes after more than a year of intense negotiations that frequently fell into personal rancor between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Canada and Mexico. Like some of Mr. Trump’s other accomplishments in business and government, the deal is partly a step forward and partly an exercise in rebranding. Canada will ease longstanding protections on its dairy market and provide access greater than what the United States would have gained through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade treaty negotiated by President Barack Obama, from which Mr. Trump withdrew last year. The United States relented on its demand to eliminate an independent tariff dispute settlement system that Canada had said was a red line. Preserving it was a major concession for the United States, which had eliminated the mechanism, known as Chapter 19, as part of its deal with Mexico. The pact also makes a series of changes to areas like intellectual property and the digital economy, including protections for patents and domain names — all of which refresh Nafta, a 25-year-old pact that had become somewhat outmoded in the digital age. But many of these innovations were drawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which included Canada and Mexico, and it prompted a senior Trump adviser to offer a rare endorsement of an Obama legacy achievement that Mr. Trump delighting in dismantling.”