Six years to the day after the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement on trade entered into force, the Trump administration announced Wednesday that it plans to pull the plug on a deal widely viewed as a successful and stabilizing force across North America’s three largest economies.Limited time: Save 25% on NBC News subscriptionGet exclusive reporting, live Q&As and ad-free reading.Instead of renewing the deal, a senior Trump administration official told reporters the United States will begin of a decade of negotiations on amendments to the deal.
One potential outcome of these negotiations is that Washington could reach separate, bilateral trade agreements, one with Mexico and another with Canada.The move, which had been telegraphed by the administration for several months, nonetheless represented a stark reversal for President Donald Trump, who negotiated and signed the USMCA deal in 2018 after he pulled out of the North American Free Trade Agreement.A year later, Trump called the USMCA “the best and most important trade deal ever made by the USA” in a social media post.Fast forward seven years, and now the administration claims the deal failed to accomplish its stated goals of modernizing and rebalancing trade between the three countries.“The primary issues that the president’s been focused on with the world, and particularly with Canada, Mexico, is our trade deficit,” a senior Trump administration official said on the press call.“When USMCA was adopted six years ago by a bipartisan majority, and the president’s approval, the idea is that we would modernize the agreement and it would also lead to rebalancing.The agreement did succeed in modernizing the agreement,” said the official.
“But with respect to rebalancing, our trade deficits with both Mexico and Canada shot up during the Biden administration.”“We’ve started to get it under control, but we believe that the USMCA did not operate to control the deficit like the president intended, so th...