It’s Not Over Till It’s Over

The important three-way trade negotiations between the United States and its two closest neighbors, Mexico and Canada, got under way this week with remarkably little fanfare. The lack of attention is ironic when you recall how, just a few weeks ago, the political rhetoric aimed at these same trade talks was at a frenzy.

On one side, President Bush invested lots of his own political capital in pushing to get authority from Congress to put the free-trade negotiations with Mexico and Canada on a “fast track.” That is politico-diplomatic jargon for an agreement by Congress that it will either accept or reject a trade pact intact and not try to, in effect, renegotiate it by adding all kinds of special-interest amendments.

On the other side, opponents of a free-trade agreement--mostly organized labor but also some environmental and human rights activists--argued, sometimes stridently, against fast track. They said it would give Bush a blank check to strike all kinds of unseemly deals with a corrupt and repressive Mexican government, deals that would allow business to move U.S. factories and jobs south of the border.

In the end, Bush and other proponents of free trade prevailed handily. But, on the rhetorical scale at least, things got so out of hand that one prominent supporter of the proposed free-trade agreement ruefully noted this week: “We played fast track like it was the Super Bowl, when in fact fast track was the preseason game.”

Indeed, there are scores of large and small issues that will have to be resolved in the three-way talks. And it will likely be years before Bush’s dream of a North American Common Market stretching from the Yukon to the Yucatan is even close to reality.

For now, all those who share that dream in Mexico City, Ottawa and dozens of cities between will have to take whatever hope they can from the fact that the first organizational session between U.S. trade representative Carla A. Hills, Mexican Commerce Secretary Jaime Serra Puche and Canadian Trade Minister Michael Wilson went smoothly. But, to stretch the football metaphor a little further, there’s still lots of scrimmaging to do.