North American solidarity needed to navigate Trump’s trade wars
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Foreign Policy In Focus | 2 June 2025
North American solidarity needed to navigate Trump’s trade wars
By Stuart Trew, Karen Hansen-Kuhn, Manuel Perez-Rocha
Like a spoiled child, Donald Trump has kicked over the sandcastle defending what is left of the rules-based international trading order. As critics of that order, we accept the opportunity and challenge it creates to rethink international relations and mutating neoliberal dogmas.
However, we are greatly concerned by the chaos and misfortune that Trump’s actions have caused for workers and farmers across North America. No one chooses to be born in the United States, Mexico, Canada or anywhere else. Most of us have no say over where companies make what products and for which local or foreign markets. We are united in our vulnerability to sudden changes in the conditions of North American trade.
Trade rules introduced in NAFTA and the agreements of the World Trade Organization loosened constraints on corporations’ ability to operate globally and even granted them new powers to sue governments over domestic rules that were intended to ensure that investments would benefit local communities. Goods and services could be generated where labor, regulatory, and tax costs are low and sold where prices are high.
Profit-shifting and a global race-to-the-bottom on business tax rates have further padded private corporate incomes while depleting government finances for public services. Free trade intentionally disempowered and immiserated workers and governments to facilitate the flow of wealth upwards, to the owners of capital.
Trump blames workers in other countries and migrants to the United States for economic hardship and a massive increase in inequality over the free trade period. We reject this nationalistic, racist, and false view of reality. Working people in all three countries have been hurt by corporations untethered by national rules, a process enabled by decades of deregulation that was codified by trade agreements.
Our organizations have been working on alternatives to neoliberal free trade agreements for a long time. In the NAFTA renegotiations of 2018-2019, we and dozens of international allies jointly presented ways that international trade rules could be reformed so they benefit workers, farmers, the environment, and all Earth’s inhabitants no matter where they are located.
Stronger labor provisions in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)—the successor to NAFTA—including an effective way to rapidly correct core labor rights violations in Mexican workplaces, importantly (if modestly) balanced the interests of corporations with those of working people. Civil society movements across North America endorsed and then celebrated the removal of NAFTA’s antidemocratic investor rights provisions (ISDS) between Canada and the United States, and curtailed them with Mexico. Blocked were some of Trump’s extreme intellectual property rights proposals that would have increased drug prices across the continent.
Prior to Trump’s imposition of steel, aluminum, and automotive tariffs on Canada and Mexico, our organizations were considering how or if North American civil society might use the 2026 review of the USMCA to push beyond these modest improvements to trade rules. Trump’s actions have complicated things by pitting workers and governments against each other.
It is still not clear if Trump’s posse wants to keep the USMCA going or negotiate new bilateral agreements. Public sentiment in Canada currently opposes any deepening of relations with the brutish Trump presidency.
Even though Trump has walked back universal tariffs on Canada and Mexico, those that remain threaten jobs, including in the United States, and violate the USMCA—the deal Trump negotiated during his first term and still claims to be working well. We may be forced to engage with Trump’s chaotic process.
Many of our demands for a more people-focused North American economy are as resonant and vital as they have ever been They include the primacy of a just transition and addressing climate change, acknowledgement of Indigenous rights and sovereignty, ending sexual harassment and violence in workplaces, the fight for higher wages and good jobs, rights for migrant workers in all three economies.
Is it even conceivable that these items could be put on the agenda of a North American trade dialogue under Trump? They may be non-starters in Washington. Canada has just elected a government that hopes to pursue a fast new trade and security deal with America, in part by meeting Trump’s demands to significantly increase global military spending. President Sheinbaum wants a quick deal with Trump, too, and is not in a rush to consult the Mexican people about what that deal should look like.
What are the options for North American civil society advocates of trade justice within and beyond North America in such a pressure-cooker environment? There are no easy answers. But we are convinced that a coordinated and unified North American civil society position would help strengthen the cause of workers, farmers, Indigenous Peoples, women, environmental, human rights, and social justice advocates in all three countries.
Tariffs can be useful as part of economic development strategies and, for many countries, as a source of income. But as this week’s U.S. Court of International Trade ruling points out, Trump’s worldwide and reciprocal tariffs are not rationally linked to any such agenda and are, as a consequence, illegal. While the Trump administration appeals that ruling, tariffs on Canadian and Mexican steel, aluminum and automotive sectors—highly integrated sectors with long histories in all three countries—destroy productive investment, livelihoods, and good will. We refuse to let these tariffs divide us.
People in all three countries want decent jobs, healthy food systems and environments, and democratic processes to get us there. Trump’s gunboat diplomacy and erratic deals, divorced from any semblance of public policies to support job creation or sustainable economies, will only lead to further disintegration—in both senses of the word.
The alternatives to USMCA and similar deals developed over decades through international solidarity provide a real path forward to counter corporate power and rebuild resilient economies and respectful international relations.
