WASHINGTON—On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump declared of his trade agreement with Canada and Mexico: “It’s a brand new deal. It’s not NAFTA redone. It’s a brand new deal.” Later in the day, he said, “NAFTA was a disaster for our country…Essentially, we’re terminating NAFTA.”On Tuesday, the chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, Kevin Hassett, went on television to talk about the agreement. He referred to it as the “new NAFTA.” Later in the day, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley told Bloomberg that Congress could vote quickly on the agreement, since “95 per cent of what we will be voting on is the same as NAFTA.”Trump’s colleagues are more right than he is. The president has a political interest in pretending he has eradicated a North American Free Trade Agreement he has called the worst trade agreement in world history. But the new agreement, named the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) at Trump’s urging, retains the central features and most secondary features of the 24-year-old NAFTA, trade experts say.Trump’s critics are wrong to claim that Trump has changed nothing but the name. The new agreement makes dozens of policy changes, some of them significant.Many of the changes, however, are incremental tweaks. And where there is entirely new text that was not in the original NAFTA, a significant chunk of it was borrowed from the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, an agreement Trump has disparaged and withdrawn the U.S. from.The TPP, which included all three of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, was intended in part to serve as a vehicle for modernizing NAFTA.“I think the president is trying to do a rebranding job on what remains, essentially, NAFTA,” said Robert Fisher, a U.S. negotiator in the original NAFTA talks and now managing director of trade consulting firm Hills and Co. “What the president’s done is taken two agr ...
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