Vice President Mike Pence, in an interview with Rush Limbaugh on Thursday, praised President Donald Trump’s signing this week of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), calling it “the largest trade deal in American history.”
While the USMCA is receiving almost universal praise in the national media, and has garnered strong support from both political parties, little to nothing has been said publicly, by either media or by politicians, about what should be a very serious question: What will be the long-term effect of the USMCA on America’s national sovereignty?
One would think that this would be an obvious question, considering that in the same week that President Trump was handed his supposed political “victory” of USMCA, discussions were already under way about a potential trade deal between the United States and the United Kingdom. After all, as the United States was entering into an entangling economic alliance with its neighboring nations to the north and to the south, the British were just exiting from the European Union.
The reasons that the U.K. wanted out of the EU should have given Americans, from President Trump down to the average American worker and business owner, pause. The EU began as a seemingly-benign trade deal in Europe among six nations, covering coal and steel. Created after World War II to regulate their industrial production under a centralized authority, it was formally established in 1951 by the Treaty of Paris. From that, it evolved into the European Common Market, and the European Economic Community, each time with increasingly formal economic integration, leading ultimately to the present EU.
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That is the same EU that caused the political civil war in the U.K. since Brexit was approved in a national referendum in 2016. By that time, the tentacles of the EU had reduced Britain’s national sovereignty to the point that more regulations affecting the daily lives of the average Briton came from the EU than from their own Parliament. Some have even questioned if the member nations of the EU should even be considered actual nations any more.
By signing the USMCA, President Trump and the bipartisan Congress has set the United States on the same path the nations of Europe have been on for over 60 years. While the average American would reject submerging our national sovereignty into a common government with Canada and Mexico, turning so many economic matters over to the USMCA could lead America into the trap the British just exited. The USMCA is already on course to dictate much economic life in the United States, and will no doubt only increase that dictation as the years go by.
Many conservatives have bought into the idea that these “free trade” deals have something to do with “free enterprise.” They do not. They are government-managed trade. Instead of regulations being promulgated by a nation’s own legislative body, they are crafted by unelected, faceless bureaucrats who develop the rules to implement the agreements. Americans generally rail against the rule by bureaucracy now. It is highly unlikely that the rule by international bureaucrats who will implement the terms of the USMCA are going to be better. They are likely to be much worse.
Trump and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson have publicly held out hope that a similar deal can be struck between the United States and the United Kingdom, now that the Brits have left the EU. One sticking point to any such Anglo-American trade deal is the Brits’ socialist National Health Service (NHS). How would it be part of any trade deal with the United States?
The British are concerned that they would have to grant American pharmaceutical companies greater access to U.K. healthcare contracts, and this could lead the private sector to squeeze even more profits out of the socialist system, which is predictably always looking for more money. This is itself another lesson. While the Conservative Party under Winston Churchill fought against the socialization of the healthcare system when it was being debated after World War II, once it was passed, even Conservative Party prime ministers have defended its continuation, despite its problems. Once a socialist system goes into effect, no matter its problems, it is practically impossible to overturn. One only has to point to our own experience with Medicare.
Another issue that would have to be resolved in any U.S.-U.K. trade deal would be food safety. The Brits are resistant to purchasing certain U.S. farm products. The EU blocked its members from importing beef from America because its beef was often treated with hormones.
“Britain and the United States will now be free to strike a massive new trade deal after Brexit,” Trump proclaimed recently.
But each of these trade deals requires some surrender of national sovereignty. That is a lesson that American lawmakers evidently did not learn from Brexit, and apparently neither have the Brits.
Steve Byas is a university history and government instructor and author of History’s Greatest Libels. He may be contacted at [email protected]
