On Trade, a Politically Feisty Trump Risks Economic Damage -<br />By PETER S. GOODMANAPRIL 30, 2017<br />As political theater, the threat last week from the Trump administration<br />that it would pull the United States out of the North American Free Trade Agreement effectively enhanced the White House story line.<br />But as economic policy, the feisty words — quickly downgraded to a pledge to “renegotiate” terms of trade with Mexico<br />and Canada — potentially imperil significant swaths of the American economy.<br />But the trouble with assessing Mr. Trump is that he has been stridently critical of decades<br />of American trade deals while maddeningly nonspecific about what he would change.<br />Britain’s vote to abandon the European Union — a step<br />that Mr. Trump has praised — will remove the world’s fifth-largest economy from Europe’s vast single marketplace, which allows companies to sell products from Ireland to Greece free of duties.<br />“Re-creating trade barriers between the United States<br />and Mexico will hurt many of the people Trump is ostensibly trying to help,” said Pietra Rivoli, a trade expert at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown.<br />Even before Mr. Trump took office, a mammoth deal negotiated by the Obama administration liberalizing<br />trade with Europe, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, appeared doomed.
