WASHINGTON—The first day of NAFTA talks, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said, was just about “setting the table.”Well, the host welcomed his guests by smashing some dishes.U.S. President Donald Trump’s top trade official opened the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiations on Wednesday with aggressive criticism of the deal, declaring that it has “fundamentally failed many, many Americans” and promising to seek “major” change rather than marginal tweaks.U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s opening statement stood in sharp contrast to the friendly language of Freeland, who called NAFTA an “engine of job-creation and economic growth,” and Mexican Economy Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, who said the agreement had fostered continental harmony.“We cannot ignore the huge trade deficits, the lost manufacturing jobs, the businesses that have closed or moved,” Lighthizer said at a hotel in Washington.Freeland shrugged off Lighthizer’s words, saying Canada was prepared for “moments of rhetoric” during the talks. And trade experts were divided on whether Lighthizer’s public aggressiveness suggested the actual negotiating would be contentious.Lighthizer’s audience for the statement was not Canadian or Mexican negotiators but Trump himself, said Bob Fisher, a U.S. negotiator in the original NAFTA talks and now managing director of Hills and Co.“There are public statements and there are private negotiations. And most negotiators will tell you, you don’t negotiate in public, you negotiate in private. The dynamics between the two can be very different,” Fisher said.Mickey Kantor, U.S. commerce secretary and trade representative under Bill Clinton, said Trump’s team “has a tendency to say things that are either not correct or political positioning.”“I’m not sayin ...
|
