NEW YORK ¨C For the group of people meant to be enemies of U.S. President Donald Trump¡¯s trade agenda, the revised North American trade deal reached shortly before the stroke of midnight Sunday looks pretty good.
Despite the new name (the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA) dropping any references to trade, let alone freedom, the tariff rates on imports from Canada and Mexico are still a mass of zeroes. The main new element ¡ª the abolition of a variety of milk Canada introduced last year to support its domestic dairy industry ¡ª is ultimately an anti-protectionist move. The main old element is some fiddling around NAFTA¡¯s rules on automotive trade which, as we¡¯ve argued previously, aren¡¯t likely to change much.
That suggests an emerging playbook for the Trump administration¡¯s trade agreements. As with the revised U.S.-South Korea deal announced last week, the achievement is declared to be historic while the changes made are cosmetic. That dynamic bodes rather well for the Japan-U.S. bilateral talks announced last week, not to mention the simmering trade war with China. For the globalists so often bashed in Trump-era rhetoric ¡ª and this columnist would count himself among them ¡ª that¡¯s good news.
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