Trade
As the US, Mexico, and Canada get closer to renegotiating NAFTA, the Administration's goals are ever more unclear.
At his campaign-style rally in Phoenix, Trump declared that he anticipates complete withdrawal from the treaty will be likely, a prediction he reiterated when meeting with the Finnish Prime Minister on Monday. This may have been intended a bargaining ploy, but appears to have backfired.
Mexican official have taken offence to this aggressive negotiating posture, and indicated they will not discuss renegotiation "with a gun to [their] head."
The option is not popular in the US as well. A poll by Livingston International shows that only 6 percent of Americans support withdrawing from NAFTA. A like number want it renegotiated to "modernize" it (the term being used by the negotiating teams). All in all, only 13% of Americans feel it should be renegotiated for being unfair to Americans.
Meanwhile there are several specific issues where the US position is unresolved as we enter this process.
One particularly important stumbling block is inclusion of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), a feature of most modern trade treaties where foreign companies that feel that local laws are unfairly advantaging domestic companies in violation of the treaty can force those countries into arbitration rather than relying on local courts.
This process has been controversial for the possibility it might have of allowed foreign companies to ignore US laws. It should be noted that the US has never lost an ISDS case despite having 50 ISDS-provision agreements in place, and internationally countries (rather than companies) have won 75% of all cases.
The provision is distrusted by trade skeptics on the Right and Left, but has the support of the Business Roundtable, National Association of Manufacturers, and Chamber of Commerce—who notably would not have access to ISDS domestically; their foreign competitors would. The members of these associations would have access to ISDS in Canada and Mexico.
Meanwhile, other groups are getting involved in the process. Mexican governors, via their National Conference of Governors (CONAGO) have written to the trade teams of all three nations requesting that provincial/state executives from all three countries be included in trade talks. Labor leaders in the US travelled to Canada to discuss their concerns directly with the Canadian negotiating team, a bit of a snub to the US Administration.
An analysis by Panjiva shows that some of the communities most opposed to NAFTA have the most to lose from withdrawal; among them North Dakota (which sends 86% of its exports to Canada and Mexico, and other trade-skeptic states like Michigan (#2), South Dakota (#3), Ohio (#4) and Missouri (#5) all send more than 50% of their goods to those states.
Development
New USAID Administrator Mark Green was grilled on his plans for climate change related projects during a "roundtable interview" with reporters last week. He indicated that USAID will follow the lead of partner nations in terms of identifying challenges they face, rather than analysing the impact of climate change on social and economic development itself.
In the course of elaborating on this approach, he described the economics-oriented analyses performed at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, another US development agency, which looks to identify "constraints to growth" in concert with partner nations.
The unwillingness to consider climate change in project selection and design in other countries suggests the Administration's opposition to recognising climate change transcends concerns about the economic toll of mitigation to the US, and is now ideological. Any recognition of climate chance might provoke further civil society pressure here in the US to address the issue, and so no such recognition is now possible.
References
1. http://www.oecd.org/daf/inv/investment-policy/ISDSprogressreport.pdf