Faith Wangermann - US and Mexico agree to Preliminary NAFTA agreement

The New York Times published an article today, the August 27th 2018, about a recent development in the US trade relations with Mexico and Canada. The North American Free Trade Agreement has been under review and the US and Mexico have agreed to revise many portions of it. The revisions will become official once Canada agrees as well. President Trump wishes to remove the name NAFTA and instead name it the United States Mexico Trade agreement, and exclude Canada due to issues between the two countries. The Mexican President wishes to include Canada in the agreement and is working on a trilateral negotiation by the end of this week.  President Trump has expressed his negative opinion of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and how he wishes to revise it or change it into one or multiple bilateral agreements. He believes the name has a negative connotation given to it by the perceived bad nature of the agreement. The trade agreement, having stood for 24 years, has been close to collapse in recent negotiation meetings.

The article was written by Ana Swanson and Katie Rogers for the New York Times, and was published today as the news broke. Before reading this article, I had known about NAFTA and its purpose from taking APHUG last year. I had also heard of President Trump's antipathy toward the agreement and it surprised me to read that an agreement had been reached this morning. This article is written for those who have prior knowledge of the situation, but a pretty surface level understanding as the article does not go into the specific details of the agreement. The purpose of the article is to give the reader a basic understanding of negotiations with Mexico and Canada and give an update on the situation. This article can be compared to the initial NAFTA agreements made in 1994, which was predated by an agreement between Canada and the US called the Canada United States Free Trade agreement. This is comparable to the bilateral agreement President Trump wants to form with Mexico, just with the other country in the current multilateral agreement.

Link to article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/us/politics/us-mexico-nafta-deal.html