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Trump wants to make 'shift' in NAFTA negotiations

Tuesday, 05 June 2018 1:56 PM [ Last Update: Tuesday, 05 June 2018 1:58 PM ]

US President Donald Trump (Photo by AFP)

US President Donald Trump has been pondering on how to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed between the United States, Canada and Mexico.

White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Tuesday that the president is thinking about ways to dismantle the current trilateral structure of the deal and devise a bilateral basis to negotiate new terms with Canada and Mexico one on one, separately.

President Trump “ is very seriously contemplating kind of a shift in the NAFTA negotiations. His preference now, and he asked me to convey this, is to actually negotiate with Mexico and Canada separately," Kudlow said in an interview with Fox News. "He may be moving quickly towards these bilateral discussions instead of as a whole."

Trump has repeatedly said since his campaigning days for the presidency that he would pull the US out of NAFTA which was signed by the US, Canada, and Mexico back in 1994.

He claims that pulling out of the deal would serve well to US national interests.

In the past, Trump has described NAFTA as the “single worst trade deal ever approved” by the US, and claimed that it has led to the outsourcing of thousands of jobs from the US to Mexico and China.

File photo shows Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shaking hands.

“A lot of people are going to be unhappy if I terminate NAFTA. A lot of people don’t realize how good it would be to terminate NAFTA because the way you’re going to make the best deal is to terminate NAFTA. But people would like to see me not do that,” he said.

Canada and Mexico are strongly opposed to Trump's threat of canceling the old deal and renegotiating new terms for NAFTA.

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