The New Yorker:

As a crucial negotiating deadline looms, envoys from three countries are scrambling to preserve a continent-wide economy.

By Stephania Taladrid

The negotiations that remade the North American Free Trade Agreement were, as one participant put it, a series of “near-death” experiences. For more than a year, starting in 2017, envoys from the United States, Canada, and Mexico met to determine the future of a trade alliance worth trillions of dollars. They clashed over everything from labor laws to the minutiae of duty-free imports, while repeatedly deflecting President Donald Trump’s threats to withdraw from the agreement. In the fall of 2018, they were finally prepared to sign what came to be known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. First, though, they needed to decide how long the accord should last.

nafta was what is called a “forever deal”—as with all of America’s major trade agreements, its terms were permanently fixed. This frustrated Trump’s trade czar, Robert Lighthizer, who believed that nafta had resulted in thousands of job losses and a ballooning trade deficit. Lighthizer wanted the U.S.M.C.A. to have an escape hatch: a review mechanism, or perhaps a fixed term. So he proposed that the agreement expire after four years.

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