This past Monday I posted a diary about a report that Trump’s staff called Trudeau’s staff to have Trudeau call Trump to ask Trump to chill out on his threat to withdraw from NAFTA.
Trump had magnanimously declared that he would not withdraw from NAFTA because he had received calls from the Mexican and Canadian leaders asking him not to.
Well, it turns out that Mexico actually told him to get stuffed.
Mexico said on Thursday it had called U.S. President Donald Trump's bluff over his suggestion he only decided to stay in the North American Free Trade Agreement as a favor to the leaders of Mexico and Canada after they asked him to renegotiate the deal.
However, Mexico's government said it had sent a very different message to the United States during a crisis over NAFTA's future late last month, when Trump considered starting the six-month process for withdrawing from the accord.
"The message was: if you guys think we're going to start negotiations with the trigger pulled on a U.S. exit in six months, forget about it!" Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told an audience at the Mexico Business Forum.
"If you do that, just get out already - because there's no way we're negotiating under those conditions," he said.
In the meantime, Mexico is strengthening its trade relationships elsewhere and telling Trump they can just cut their own side deal with Canada.
Guajardo said Mexico was tightening trade ties with China, deepening deals to get better market access to markets in Brazil and Argentina, making progress on a free trade deal with Jordan and updating an agreement with the European Union.
If the United States did withdraw from NAFTA in a "worst-case scenario," it would not necessarily mean the end of the deal, Guajardo said. Mexico and Canada could opt to make it the framework for their trade relationship, he said.
www.reuters.com/...