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1994 was the future
A few days ago, someone sent me this year’s installment of the old, “If Marty McFly traveled back in time now, he’d wind up in …” meme from “Back to the Future.”
In the original movie, you’ll recall, Marty’s journey flashes him from the 1985 world of Ronald Reagan and Eddie Van Halen to the 1955 of “Earth Angel” and Dwight Eisenhower.
Today he’d be going to 1994. He has lucked out. Not only because he’ll get to relive the releases of, say, Illmatic and “Pulp Fiction” – or, if you prefer, Dookie and “Friends” – but also because while he’s there trying to rescue his own future, he’s going to learn a whole lot about ours.
How did things get to be this way? How could we not see it all coming? Let’s take the trip with Marty.
When he first arrives in 1994, Marty is confused. Although his 2024 outfit – North Face puffy, Adidas sambas, baggy jeans – makes it unexpectedly easy to blend in among the natives of the 90s, this is still a bewildering world.
“Cloud” and “stream” are words of nature, rather than terms of technology, “text” is still just a noun, and everyone seems, amazingly, to know each other’s phone numbers by heart. Marty certainly does not know the importance of a SkyPager, and no one in 1994 has any idea what it means that he has to “plug in” his car.
Doc, as you would expect, is manically frazzled but basically fine. The Feds think he might be the “Unabomber” but can’t quite pin it on him. In his spare time, he has been hanging out with a fellow plutonium enthusiast named “A.Q. Khan.” When he encounters Marty, he can’t fathom why everything in the future is “lit” – “is there an unusually igniferous condition in the atmosphere in the early 21st century?”
Strange as 1994 is, when Marty starts to pay attention to the politics of the time, things begin to have an eerily familiar ring. Doc may be dumbfounded that “the casino guy with the gold-plated toilets who left his wife for the Wrestlemania girl” eventually got elected president (“Great Scott, this is even more ludicrous than President Reagan the actor!”) but Marty can see the shades of the future already.
The newspapers – and the new phenomenon of “talk radio” – are abuzz about a conservative Georgia Congressman named “Newt” whose scorching anti-establishment campaign is upending US politics, driving zero-sum culture wars straight into the heart of the national conversation. Gingrich’s strategy works – the GOP wins control of Congress for the first time since Marty’s original trip back in time to 1955. The airwaves are now crackling with partisan clashes over assault weapons, gay marriage, “political correctness,” and immigration – what year is this again?
Meanwhile, news of a massive new free trade agreement called NAFTA seems promising at a moment when history is supposed to be ending in neoliberal globalized nirvana. But McFly knows that for all its benefits, the pact will leave huge scars across parts of working-class America that will one day make their grievances felt.
What about the news from outside America? He flips on a newish channel called “CNN International.” Nelson Mandela has just become the first Black president of South Africa, a triumph for justice. At the same time, Marty learns that “the Ukraine” has agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal. As part of the deal, Russia and the West promise that no one will ever invade Ukraine. Marty already knows how that ends.
Speaking of knowing how things end, Marty also hears that PLO boss Yassir Arafat has returned from exile to Gaza for the first time in nearly 30 years and that he’s started down the garden path of a “Peace Process.” Palestinian suicide attacks are becoming more frequent. Israel is ramping up illegal settlement construction. The Jewish state is normalizing relations with a major Arab power – in this case, Jordan.
Our 2024 Marty wants to grab these people in all of these stories by the collar and yell “Stop! Can’t you see where this is going?” But he has bigger fish to fry: He still has to get his parents to kiss at the high school dance. Luckily his rendition of the ‘94 chart-topper “Bump ‘n’ Grind” does the trick.
Now, let’s go to the future ourselves. If we accept the premise of “Back to the Future” – and we do – then one thing is certain: There is, at this very moment, a column just like this one being written in the year 2054.
The author of that column has just received – probably via some VR connection between two brains in jars – the same “Marty McFly meme.” In it, the trip is to 2024.
What does 2054 Marty see during his visit to our world? What seeds are we planting, and can we possibly know what harvest they’ll bring?
Let me know what you think. I’ll run the best answers after next week’s column. But go easy on yourself – after all, as a wise man once cautioned: “Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?”
Why Mexico is a key issue in the 2024 US election
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC shares his perspective on US politics.
I'm here in Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, which is a country that is turning out to be a major potential campaign issue in the US 2024 elections. We've already seen several Republican candidates try to distinguish themselves by painting Mexico as a bad guy. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has said that he wants to militarize the border in order to stop the flow of drugs, guns and crime and illegal immigrants coming over the border. Former President Donald Trump famously renegotiated NAFTA with Mexico and used the threat of additional tariffs to force Mexico to secure its southern border to prevent Central American migrants moving up into the United States. So this is going to be a big issue over the next 12 months in the US.
Both Democrats and Republicans, likely Democrat nominee Joe Biden and potential nominee Donald Trump are vying for the votes of autoworkers inside the US, which means promising to bring more domestic production back home to the US, which could potentially hurt Mexico, which has, of course, a free trade agreement with the United States. There's also a presidential election here in Mexico. So depending on the outcome of that, that could be the opportunity to fundamentally reset relations. One likely candidate has virtually no foreign policy experience, and one likely candidate has a lot of foreign policy experience, having dealt extensively with the United States. And the outcome here is going to be important when the US and Mexico start to renegotiate the USMCA, the trade agreement that binds the three North American countries together in 2026. There is a periodic six-year agreement to revisit details of that. And as the US starts to focus more on industrial policy and production directly in the United States, this could be an issue for Mexico, who counts on the American market for a large segment of its exports, particularly in the automotive industry. The Mexican government has lagged behind a little bit other governments in taking advantage of the opportunity of the trade war between the US and China to create more sourcing opportunities out of Mexico. And that's going to be a major issue to watch over the next several years. So lots of interesting issues here in Mexico that will affect US politics.
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The Graphic Truth: US trade deficit with Canada & Mexico
In 2016, Donald Trump successfully mobilized his base around NAFTA being “the worst trade deal ever signed.” He argued that US industries were being suppressed by trade deficits with Canada and Mexico, and he promised to disband the agreement if elected.
Mexico was also under pressure for renegotiation. While NAFTA turbocharged Mexican agricultural and manufacturing sectors, many thought Mexico was too reliant on the US importing its products, putting its economy at the mercy of international food prices and exchange rates.
When Trump won the presidency, he kept his promise and called for the trade deal to be renegotiated. The promise he didn’t keep: lowering the trade deficit.
The law of the land now is the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA, which still gives Canada and Mexico sweeping access to export products to the US. Trade deficits aren’t inherently negative as they help consumers benefit from cheaper goods, but domestic industries do struggle in the face of increased competition.
We look at how the US trade deficit with Mexico and Canada has grown since NAFTA was disbanded.
The US and Canada’s complicated love story
US President Joe Biden has said he wants to patch up a US-Canada relationship that frayed under Trump. In fact, Biden's first phone call to a foreign leader after taking office was to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. That makes sense, considering the two long-allied democracies share a continent and do some $700 billion in annual trade across the world's longest land border.
Biden and Trudeau — who was best buddies with Barack Obama, Biden's former boss — share views in many areas, from human rights and democracy promotion to, in principle, climate change. But a host of issues will make it hard to smooth things over completely. What are the main sticking points between Ottawa and Washington right now?
🛢Climate and energy🛢. One of Biden's first executive orders scrapped the Keystone XL pipeline project, which would have carried oil from Alberta, Canada, to the Texas Gulf — a boon for Canada's oil industry, the country's number one export and crucial to its post-pandemic recovery. While Biden's move was consistent with his commitment to prioritize investment in clean energy, some in Ottawa felt snubbed by a lack of consultation.
Nixing the deal was a massive blow for Canada, which was relying on Keystone's infrastructure to boost its transportation capacity from landlocked Alberta province to lucrative energy markets in the Gulf Coast. "The US won't bear much of a cost… that will fall almost entirely on Canada," read a recent scathing editorial in Canada's Globe and Mail publication. To be sure, the US stands to lose roughly 3,900 — mostly temporary — jobs over a two-year period because of the axed deal. Still, Canada was on the losing side this time.
💰Trade equation💰. Biden's "Buy American'' executive order obligates US federal agencies to prioritize American bidders for US-based contracts worth more than $10,000. Importantly, it also raises the amount of US material a venture must include in order to be certified as "American-made."
While this protectionist approach to procurement is not new, Ottawa is worried that it will disrupt supply chains as it tries to boost its pandemic-battered economy (Canada's GDP shrank by 5.1 percent in 2020).
The implications of "Buy American" are clear: more American-made products means less foreign made ones. That's a blow for Canadian exports, 75 percent of which are sent to the US. As COVID rages on and the US-Canada border has remained closed for almost a year, these challenges are now more pronounced.
The US-China continuum. Like many other US allies looking towards a future with China as an economic superpower, Canada wants to maintain a robust alliance with a politically volatile US while also seeking to diversify economic relations with a country that could soon be the world's largest economy.
Indeed, Ottawa recently experienced the blowback of having its eggs in (mostly) one basket when the Trump administration slapped tariffs on Canadian aluminium, and demanded the grueling renegotiation of NAFTA. For Canadians, the recent policy volatility from one US administration to the next reinforces the need to make more friends, not fewer.
Chinese telecommunications has also become entangled in the US-Canada-China triangle. Canada has unofficially sidelined Chinese tech giant Huawei's 5G networks to appease Washington. Additionally, the arrest in Canada of Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou (at the behest of the US for helping Huawei evade US sanctions on Iran) prompted Beijing to arbitrarily imprison two Canadian citizens. Clearly, the combative approach the US has taken towards China in recent years has been inescapable for middle-power Canada.
But China also presents Canada with new opportunities to cooperate on areas of mutual importance like climate change. These dynamics require a carefully crafted balancing act from a liberal pragmatist like Trudeau.
Looking ahead: Canada's longtime problem in Washington — lack of attention — will be profound under Biden. Trudeau and Trump both needed each other to pass a new trade pact, but Biden can make progress on many of his policy priorities (climate change, Iran, immigration) without help from the northern neighbor — and the Canadians know that their help is not crucial for America's new leader.
Goodbye, NAFTA. Hello, USMCA.
Four years ago, Donald Trump promised to replace the "worst deal ever made" — known to the rest of us simply as NAFTA, the massive 1994 trade pact linking the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Now, he's officially done so. The new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaces NAFTA, comes into effect on July 1st.
How did we get here, and what does it mean?
Let's look back. NAFTA had a checkered history. On the one hand, it successfully integrated two of the world's most advanced economies (the US and Canada) with a developing one (Mexico), while boosting cross-border trade from $289.3 billion in 1993 to $623.1 billion in 2003, and lowering prices for most North American-made goods and services.
On the other hand, it resulted in net job losses and lower wages for many US factory workers. Coupled with the jobs that fled to China several years later, NAFTA came to be seen as part of the perfect storm of forces that clobbered American workers at the turn of the century.
Still, NAFTA was relatively popular in the US until less than a decade ago, when the economic wreckage of the financial crisis prompted more Americans to question the benefits of free trade in general, and NAFTA in particular. President Trump capitalized on that popular sentiment, pledging on the campaign trail to scrap NAFTA and replace it with something better. American views on free trade have improved dramatically since 2016, but the US is still deeply polarized on NAFTA.
So, is the UMSCA really a better deal? It depends on whom you ask. Here's the biggest issue that was on the table for each of the pact's three signatories and how it played out:
United States. Labor unions in particular are happy that the new trade deal raises minimum wages for workers who make goods covered by the deal. The US auto industry, for example, lobbied for USMCA to mandate that more of each vehicle be made by workers earning at least $16 per hour, in order to undermine the ability of lower-wage Mexican factories to take jobs from American workers.
On the other hand, vehicles made in North America will likely become more expensive for US consumers, as the new trade deal requires more of each automobile to be assembled from parts made in the US, Canada or Mexico — rather than in lower-cost Asian countries.
Mexico. Under the USMCA, Mexican workers will be less likely to get jobs outsourced from the US and Canada. But those who do find work will be entitled to better labor standards, including the right to unionize and to have their complaints investigated by UMSCA panels.
Canada. Canada won one big thing: the USMCA retains NAFTA's trade dispute settlement mechanisms, meaning that trade disputes with US companies will be settled by a multilateral panel rather than in a US court (as the Trump administration wanted). But the Canadian dairy industry, for one, is not happy about having to open the local market to US competition. No use crying over spilled milk now, though.
And what about Trump? Upon first glance, following through on a campaign promise to revisit a major trade deal is a big political win for the US president, who views trade as a zero-sum game and believes tariffs are the best way to resolve most trade disputes. It also reduces the pressure on Trump to move beyond his "phase one" deal with China — his main trade war opponent — before the November election.
However, a closer look reveals that the USMCA is more of a facelift than a complete do-over of NAFTA. Republican Senator Chuck Grassley once referred to the UMSCA as about 95 percent the same as NAFTA. And in the end Trump didn't get many items on his wish list, such as removing Canadian subsidies on lumber exports or scrapping Mexico's value-added tax on US imports.
Indeed, the UMSCA is often called NAFTA 2.0. The question now is, will we have to wait another 26 years for the next update?
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