NAFTA Redux
- Details
- Published on Thursday, 27 April 2017 22:15
- Written by editor
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(((( T h e B u l l e t ))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1404 .... April 28, 2017
____________________________________________________
NAFTA Redux
Ernie Tate
The new Trump administration has made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, Mexico and the United States, a major issue in its relations with its two neighbours. Recently, Trump has threatened to tear it up. With his standard nationalist demagogy, he claims "previous bad trade deals," have cost the United States many jobs as a result of American manufacturers moving plants off-shore. He is now in the process of telling Canada and Mexico the new administration is prepared to bully its way to a new and more favourable arrangement for itself.
There are no smiley faces, no comforting talk about making the deal "work for everyone"; instead the administration, casting the niceties of diplomacy aside, is using... the hard language of war, even resorting to martial terms to let us know how they think the new negotiations should proceed. "Well, we're in a trade war," stated the U.S. Commerce secretary, the multi-billionaire, Wilbur Ross, when asked directly about that possibility in relation to NAFTA. "We've been in a trade war for decades -- that's why we have a deficit. The difference is our troops are now coming to the ramparts." "If people know you have the big bazooka, you probably don't have to use it," he stated.
"The Mexicans know, the Canadians know, everybody knows, times are different. We are going to have new trade relations with people. And they all know they're going to have to make concessions. The only question is what's the magnitude, and what's the form of the concessions," he said.
It has to be noted here, that this stance on trade is a corollary to a more aggressive and even militaristic foreign policy shift toward the world, toward those countries who are outside the American empire -- the end of the policy of "strategic impatience" toward North Korea, the bombings of Syria and Mosul, Iraq, the dropping of the monster bomb and the increase of troop levels in Afghanistan and a more aggressive, even bellicose, stance toward China, Iran, Russia and Cuba. In this shift to the right by the American ruling class, I prefer to see it as a further deepening of neoliberalism -- neoliberalism on steroids if you wish -- that has been underway for a considerable period of time. It is by no means a dismantling of the American empire, but a new phase in how it relates to the rest of the world.