When Fox News asked President Trump last month if the United States was looking to update the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, he was unambiguous: “I’d rather be independent.”
Having declined to renew the agreement for a full 16-year term, the Trump administration triggered an annual review process. If the three countries can’t agree on how USMCA should change, it will automatically expire in 2036—or earlier, if the U.S. decides to leave. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer says the United States is now seeking separate interim arrangements with both countries to be concluded by the end of the year, while talks on “really important” issues continue into 2027.
What’s clear is that the agreement cannot continue in its current form. USMCA retains the essential features of its predecessor agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the world has changed too much since NAFTA was ratified in 1993. NAFTA sought to achieve maximum integration between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, and zeroed out tariffs on virtually all traded goods.
That was before anyone worried about American deindustrialization—or China. NAFTA’s premise was that American industry would get rich exporting to the rising Mexican middle class. Instead, American firms quickly realized they could turn low-wage, lightly regulated Mexico into an export platform to serve their existing American market, and rapidly offshored production.
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