nafta

Trump Militarizes Mexico

In return for having the tariff “indefinitely suspended,” Mexico has agreed to militarize the country using Mr. López Obrador’s newly created National Guard, which is under military command. The effort will start at the southern border, though where it will end is anybody’s guess.

Mr. Trump has claimed victory in his tariff gambit. But it’s unclear how effective the promised troops will be at stopping migrants. The main causes of the crisis are liberal U.S. laws and procedures for claiming asylum, which attract migrants from Central America and other places. Congress has refused to pass reform. But markets work, as more than a half-century of a failed war on drugs proves, and the wild Guatemalan border will not be easily sealed.

.. Meanwhile, AMLO, as the Mexican president is popularly known, also won, though insidiously. The career politician with an authoritarian bent is a backer of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Since taking office in December, he has been cozying up to the military. Now he pockets more power, and with the blessing of Washington. This is a setback for the rule of law.

President López Obrador initially had very high approval ratings. But they began falling when Mexico’s economy slumped in the first quarter, and his attacks on the press alienated even some of his most ideologically sympathetic constituents. Mexicans who were worried about the strongman instincts of their socialist president gained hope that the slowdown would force him to exercise greater restraint.

Then came Mr. Trump’s May 30 threat, and Mexicans rallied behind their president. A poll by the Mexican daily El Financiero last week found that “84% of Mexicans believe that, faced with pressure” from Mr. Trump, “the country should remain united and support” AMLO.

Mr. López Obrador knows how to play politics. In the earliest months of his presidency he encouraged the migrants before taking a more practical stance. In the face of standard Trump hyperbole about Mexico, he calmly sent a delegation to Washington to negotiate. His base is praising the deal, though had it been sealed by an AMLO opponent they would have vigorously denounced it. His opposition is happy because free trade is saved.

An AMLO rally Saturday in Tijuana was originally billed as “an act of unity to defend the dignity of Mexico and in favor of the friendship with the people of the United States.” After the two sides came to agreement, it was changed to a “celebration” of the deal—and of the new life that Mr. Trump breathed into AMLO’s presidency.

.. Blowing up the North American economy to solve the migration crisis never made sense. Before the North American Free Trade Agreement, the average tariff for Mexican goods entering the U.S. was only 4%. Twenty-five years later, North America is a highly integrated productive colossus that depends for its efficiency on seamless cross-border supply networks.

Trump’s Top Trade Adviser Opposed Mexican Tariffs

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer argued plan could jeopardize North American trade accord

President Trump’s top trade adviser opposed the White House’s threat to impose escalating tariffs on Mexico, arguing that the plan could jeopardize a pending North American trade accord, people familiar with the situation said.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has argued that tariffs on Mexico further cloud prospects for ratification of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the proposed successor to Nafta that is already facing significant hurdles in the Democrat-controlled House, these people said.

“Lighthizer is not happy,” one of the people, an administration official, said. A spokesman for Mr. Lighthizer declined to comment.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump decided to threaten tariffs as he became increasingly frustrated with the numbers of undocumented immigrants crossing into the U.S. through the Mexican border, the people said.

“This is something he’s talked about for a long time but people always talked him out of it,” said one of the people, a former administration official.

In recent days the president lost his patience, according to one of the people who spoke about Mr. Lighthizer’s concerns and a senior administration official. He had listened to his advisers for months, who told him not to take action against President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s new administration while it was forming its government, they said.

“He got tired of waiting for the new government to settle in,” one of the people familiar with the situation said.

“The last time he did tariffs on Mexico, Mexico responded, so he wanted to try again in the context of border security,” the senior administration official said.

There was a meeting with the president’s trade team on Wednesday and again on Thursday, when the president phoned in from Air Force One, according to one of the people.

“In both meetings, the president made very clear that he wants to do this,” one of the people said.

U.S. officials, including Mr. Lighthizer, have stressed to Congress the importance of enacting USMCA, meant to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, in part to show other trading partners that high-pressure talks with Mr. Trump can lead to a win for all sides.

One of the officials noted that Mr. Lighthizer has a particularly good working relationship with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and behind closed doors, he has managed to leverage that relationship to make progress in advancing the USMCA through Congress. Some in the administration now fear that the president’s latest move may derail any progress Mr. Lighthizer has made, the people familiar with the situation said.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump threatened to impose 5% tariffs on nearly $360 billion in goods imported from Mexico starting June 10 unless Mexico takes steps to stem the flow of immigrants across the border. If no action is taken, tariffs would eventually go up to 25% by Oct. 1.

Foreign Leaders Have Realized Trump Is a Pushover

The president’s reported disclosure of classified information to Russia is only the latest example of the self-proclaimed great negotiator conceding to officials from overseas everything they want.

Politico’s Susan Glasser confirmed, the Russians had been pressing hard for an in-person meeting with Trump, “a man who is now known for starkly reversing his positions if exposed to in-person pleasantries.”

.. As it happened, the meeting with Xi was something of a love-fest. Trump and his spokesman have boasted since about the very good relationship they created with China’s leader, and hailed their friendship. If Trump was pleased with the outcome, Xi must have been ecstatic. The Chinese president emerged from the meeting with warm praise from Trump; a concession from the U.S. president that China was not manipulating its currency; and conciliatory statements about China’s ability to twist the arm of North Korea, its wild-eyed, nuclear-armed neighbor.

Trump explained the last of these flip-flops in an interview with The Wall Street Journal:

He then went into the history of China and Korea. Not North Korea, Korea. And you know, you’re talking about thousands of years … and many wars. And Korea actually used to be a part of China. And after listening for 10 minutes I realized that not—it’s not so easy. You know I felt pretty strongly that they have—that they had a tremendous power over China. I actually do think they do have an economic power, and they have certainly a border power to an extent, but they also—a lot of goods come in. But it’s not what you would think.

The explanation was remarkable not only for Trump’s frank admission that he knew little about the background of the Korean Peninsula, but for his equally frank admission that the leader of a foreign country—and not just any foreign country, but a major American rival that Trump had repeatedly savaged rhetorically—could reverse his understanding of a key issue with just 10 minutes of persuasion.

The explanation was remarkable not only for Trump’s frank admission that he knew little about the background of the Korean Peninsula, but for his equally frank admission that the leader of a foreign country—and not just any foreign country, but a major American rival that Trump had repeatedly savaged rhetorically—could reverse his understanding of a key issue with just 10 minutes of persuasion.

It is no wonder that the Russians were eager to get in a room with Trump, but Russia and China were not the only foreign countries to recognize how easily swayed Trump could be.

The pattern began even before he was inaugurated, with a December phone call between Trump and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen. Not only was the conversation a major breach of protocol, Trump seemed to be flirting with abandoning American recognition that Beijing considers Taiwan a part of a unified China. He was eventually talked down from this by advisers—and his vacillation is one reason Xi was so eager to meet—but his impressionability had been established.

Another example came in a bizarre 24 hours of kabuki geopolitical theater in late April. With Trump reeling from a series of legislative and judicial defeats, White House officials told reporters the president was close to signing an executive order announcing that the U.S. would pull out of NAFTA. That evening, the leaders of Canada and Mexico both called Trump. As the president told it, they begged him to reconsider, and to renegotiate the terms of the deal instead. Trump presented this as a triumph: He’d gotten them to agree to renegotiation. Savvier observers saw a different picture: Trump’s threats were empty and his bluster easily dispelled. After issuing an intemperate threat, Trump had to be talked down by foreign leaders, whose only “concession” was agreeing to a renegotiation they had both long-since agreed to.

Even as Trump seems to get rolled by adversaries, his relationships with allies have been troubled. While Canada and Mexico are both close friends, the U.S. has notably vexed relationships with Russia, China, and Taiwan. Trump had a warm visit with U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May, but a visit from German Chancellor Angela Merkel was downright icy, marred by an ill-considered joke from Trump as well as his conspiracy-mongering about Barack Obama. Trump even managed to set off a feud in a phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, though they smoothed things over during a recent visit by Turnbull to the U.S.

Trump Almost Always Folds

From trade deals to gun control and immigration to military deployments, the president has a consistent pattern: Talk a big game, then back down.

President Trump’s May 8 announcement that he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal should not have come as a surprise. He’d spent years railing against the plan—“the worst deal ever,” he dubbed it—and had promised to rip it up. And yet up to the moment when the president made the final call, there was still some suspense about what he would say.

This was not merely wishful thinking by the deal’s backers, though it was partly that. It was not only that members of Trump’s team, most notably Defense Secretary James Mattis, had voiced support for the deal. It wasn’t even just that Trump relishes taking the press (and even his own advisers) by surprise.

No, the other big reason that no one could be sure was that Trump almost always folds. Faced with a tough decision, the president has consistently blinked, giving in to his opponents. Trump has mocked former Secretary of State John Kerry for his supposedly poor negotiation powers, argued that multiple past international agreements suffered from weak-kneed diplomacy, and criticized British Prime Minister Theresa May, a close U.S. ally, for her conduct of the discussion on the U.K.’s departure from the European Union.

The president talks a good—or at least aggressive—game, but he doesn’t always walk it. The Iran deal is one of the few cases—which also include ditching the Paris climate agreement, leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem—where Trump has stuck to the hard-nosed approach he promised during the campaign. But he twice flinched on Iran, too. In October 2017, his first chance to walk away from the deal, he made threatening noises but kicked the deal over to Congress and didn’t withdraw. He passed up another chance in January.

Foreign leaders were among the first to notice Trump was a pushover. In the first weeks of his presidency, they angled for face-to-face meetings with the new president, realizing that in personal meetings, especially when subjected to flattery, he could be swayed. The efforts paid off: Trump shared sensitive intelligence with the Russian foreign minister and ambassador. He

backed down from threats to brand China a currency manipulator, and said that

a 10-minute lesson from Xi Jinping on Chinese–Korean relations had convinced him Beijing had less sway over Kim Jong Un than he had believed. That same spring, Trump

called the leaders of Mexico and Canada to announce he was going to pull out of nafta. The two men convinced Trump to agree to renegotiation instead, a significant climbdown.

The pattern has persisted ever since, with two prominent examples in the last three days alone. One was a high-stakes meeting at the White House, centered on the FBI’s reported used of an informant on the Trump campaign. Ahead of the meetings, there was speculation that Trump, who had tweeted furiously about the informant, would demand an unusual inquiry into the Justice Department or force Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein out. Instead, the meeting ended with a plan for future meetings, and the Justice Department’s committing to do more or less what it had already committed to doing.

Meanwhile, negotiations with China intended to forestall a trade war, which Trump previously said would be “easy to win,” wrapped up. The U.S. agreed to postpone tariffs on Chinese imports. The Chinese made some vague promises about narrowing the U.S. trade deficit, but as Keith Bradsher writes, “China gave up little in return, spurning the administration’s nudges for a concrete commitment to buy more goods from the United States, and avoiding limits on its efforts to build new high-tech Chinese industries.”

This is a repeated motif on trade deals. Trump makes a splashy announcement, but when it comes to the details, he pulls his punches. China is not the only target of suggested Trump tariffs. In March, he abruptly announced tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, saying foreign products were hurting U.S. producers. But he has postponed tariffs on the European Union after objections from American allies there, and also postponed tariffs on steel from Canada, the single largest exporter of steel to the U.S. in 2017, because of the ongoing nafta negotiations.

How are those nafta talks going, by the way? Though Trump was nearly as negative about nafta as he was about the Iran nuclear agreement, he shied away from immediately withdrawing last spring, and talks have slowly dragged on. After the administration missed a deadline that Speaker Paul Ryan set for congressional approval of a deal, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said this week that the process could slide into 2019.

He even has some regrets about withdrawing from the TPP. The Wall Street Journal reported in April that the president had told lawmakers that he had “deputized Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, and Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, to study the possibility of re-entering the TPP if the terms were favorable.”

Trump is just as apt to fold on other matters. On a June 2017 call with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, according to The Washington Post, Trump was supposed to scold the Saudis for their offensive against Qatar. After Salman delivered a flattering series of compliments, the president dropped his objections.

In December, when the U.S. announced it would recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn the move. Trump said the U.S. would withhold aid from those who voted for the resolution. “Let them vote against us,” he said. “We’ll save a lot. We don’t care. But this isn’t like it used to be where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars.” Yet when the White House released its budget for 2019, “not a single country lost funding on the basis of voting against the U.S. at the UN,” John Hudson reported. More recently, he made a similar threat to countries that don’t back a joint North American bid for the 2026 World Cup, raising the question of why any country should take the threat seriously.

In January, Trump met with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer with a government shutdown looming. In exchange for Democrats backing funding for increased border security and possibly a wall, Trump agreed to back a deal to replace daca, the executive order creating a legal status for unauthorized immigrants brought to the United States as children. Hard-liners in the White House thought the deal was such a giveaway, in fact, that Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly called Schumer and torpedoed it.

In February, Trump held a meeting with members of Congress to discuss gun control following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. He ridiculed lawmakers for being too timid in confronting the NRA and asked them to take up proposals opposed by the group. Days later, he met with the NRA, and when he unveiled his slate of ideas to combat gun violence, it included none of the proposals the NRA opposed.

Why is Trump so apt to fold? One reason is that he is surrounded by advisers who often feel that his ideas are bad and try to talk him out of them. The Iran-deal withdrawal came only after National-Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, who supported the deal, was pushed out and replaced with the more hawkish John Bolton. Beyond that, however, Trump brings two big weaknesses to the table.

First, he’s not as skilled a negotiator as he likes to pretend, and second,

he seldom puts in the time to learn the facts about whatever he’s handling.

In April, Jonathan Swan had an illuminating post about Trump’s one-dimensional approach to negotiating:

President Trump tells people he keeps the world guessing with his wild unpredictability. But those who work most closely with him say he’s a one-trick pony in negotiations.

The trick: Threaten the outrageous, ratchet up the tension, amplify it with tweets and taunts, and then compromise on fairly conventional middle ground.

“His ultimate gamble is: ‘You don’t have as big of stones as I do,’” a source close to Trump told me. “‘You’re going to feel too uncomfortable where I go. The stakes are too high. This is too far outside your comfort zone.’”

This turns out to be an effective tool, because not many people have Trump’s appetite for awkwardness. But if it doesn’t work, the president has few other tools at his disposal, and tends to back down.

Trump is also at a disadvantage because he doesn’t bother to do his homework. The president has strong instinctive views, but little tolerance for studying facts. During the campaign, he said he’d figure out what he needed to know once he won, but since taking office he hasn’t bothered. That means he’s already ceded the debate over reality to his opponents, as when China’s Xi laid out his history lesson on Chinese–Korean relations.

The president’s single negotiating trick and lack of interest in facts threaten to come together to dangerous effect in his upcoming summit with North Korea’s Kim. That is, assuming it happens: The Times reported on Sunday that Trump was starting to get cold feet about it, and he said on Tuesday that the meeting might be delayed beyond the scheduled June 12 date.

Trump has portrayed even the fact of this meeting as a major breakthrough, and evidence that he can get done what other presidents could not. He managed it in part, however, by backing down. In November 2017, he said that North Korea must fully denuclearize before he would consider talks. Pyongyang made no such commitment before Trump announced the summit, though.

Should the meeting come together, however, Trump will be in a high-stakes conversation with Kim. This is risky because, as past experience has shown, Trump is easily susceptible to flattery and other forms of persuasion when meeting face-to-face with foreign leaders. He will also face a disadvantage on the facts. The nuclear program has been central to North Korea’s national policy for years, while for an American president it is just one of scores of important issues, and Trump’s aides say he has made little effort to cram.

“Going into the North Korea meeting, senior administration officials say, the president has been almost singularly focused on the pageantry of the summit—including the suspenseful roll-out of details,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday. “He has not been deeply engaged in briefing materials on North Korea’s nuclear program, said three people with knowledge of the White House efforts.”

This doesn’t mean that Trump will necessarily fold when he meets Kim in Singapore. What makes a summit like this so interesting, and risky, is how unusual and volatile it is. It matches up two leaders who are unusual and volatile themselves. Both have a long history of ostentatious bluster, and spotty records of follow-through. When they’re eyeball to eyeball, it’s an open question which one will blink first, but history suggests it’s likeliest to be Trump.