Trumping Trade: The Future of NAFTA

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has stitched the economies of Mexico, Canada, and the United States together since 1994. However, over those twenty-plus years, criticism and controversy have continuously dogged the free trade pact. To U.S. opponents of the deal, NAFTA represents the kind of rampant globalization that has helped enrich a feckless elite at the cost of hundreds of thousands of working class jobs. For decades, this deep resistance to NAFTA and deals of its kind has found a home on the political Left, with politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) arguing that the agreement has lost 850,000 American jobs (a widely disputed figure).

But, after the election of Donald Trump, opposition to free trade and NAFTA in particular has found a new, if unfamiliar, home in the Republican Party. During the campaign, Trump vilified NAFTA as “probably the worst trade deal…ever signed in the history of the world” and promised to “withdraw from NAFTA and start all over again” if he could not renegotiate the agreement to his liking. 

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