On Tuesday, August 22, in a violent rant before a frenzied audience in Phoenix, Arizona, Donald Trump went on a renewed rampage against Mexico: He literally threatened to shut down the U.S. government if Congress doesn’t present him with a spending bill for the next fiscal year that includes 1.6 billion dollars to fund the construction for a wall on the southern border. In his words: “The Democrats would like us not to do it, but believe me, if we have to close down our government, we´re building that wall ! That could very well not be an idle threat since the federal government will run out of money if a new spending bill has not been passed by the U.S. Senate by September 20th ! The House of Representatives has in fact passed legislation that would provide Trump´s 1.6 billion dollars in funding to begin work on the wall, but it now seems impossible that this appropriations bill would even get out of the appropriations committee in the Senate since Trump has managed to thoroughly poison his relationship with the Republican majority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell. The two haven´t spoken for the past 3 weeks.
Trump then followed up on his apocalyptic threat by focusing on the renegotiation of the NAFTA Agreement, which just started last week in Washington, in the following alarming terms: “Personally, I don´t think we can make a deal… I think we´ll end up probably terminating NAFTA at some point…I don´t think you can make a deal without a termination first…but we’re going to see what happens, OK? It seems that Trump is signaling his intention to purposely kill NAFTA in the upcoming rounds of negotiation and then force Mexico into a destructive bilateral relationship based on a new, strictly bilateral trade agreement. Our Secretary of Foreign Relations, Luis Videgaray, expressed his opinion that Trump’s violent polemics are just a negotiation strategy, but he seems to forget that with Donald Trump we are not dealing with a rational human being, but a malignant, pathological narcissistic personality, fully capable of acting irrationally at any given moment.
To add to the already poisoned atmosphere: early on Tuesday, Rex Tillerson, the U.S. Secretary of State ordered his State Department to issue a travel warning against visits to literally all Mexican tourist resorts – a warning of such vehemence – that it will surely cost us billions in tourism revenue. So, then, there remains the logical question: should we really proceed with the next round of negotiations on September 1st in Mexico City? The authors believe that delaying tactics would be more to our benefit, in the hopes that the Trump Government might suffer a budgetary collapse in the next few months. In fact, we believe that the political and economic aspects of the NAFTA renegotiation process must be separated, which means that the negotiations must last long enough so that there are no gaps in each negotiated chapter and this can last for a few years especially When it is intended to renegotiate chapters such as the rules of origin in the automotive sector, however, at the end of the first round of renegotiation, there is still no draft that gives us more information to carry out a full analysis of the first impacts that would have NAFTA . Without accurate information, everything else is speculation!!!
