Economic Liberalism and the Operational Code Beliefs of U.S. Presidents: The Initiation of Nafta Disputes, 1989–2002

Abstract

In the summer months of 1992 trade bureaucrats in Ottawa were besieged by a flurry of actions by their U.S. counterparts in the Bush administration. Working under the joint aegis of the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement and current U.S. trade law, Washington appeared to be shifting to a much more aggressive stance on many issues that had concerned the two sides on trade for the last several months. Canadian bureaucrats were not surprised. They liked to refer to any U.S. election year as “the silly season,” ripe for electoral-minded trade disputes. However, once all was said and done, very few of the U.S. actions resulted in any concrete gains by the initiators. In fact, most of the public actions were outright failures to prevail over the liberal principle of free trade that informs the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The tariff is not an economic problem exclusively. It is a political problem as well.

—E.E. Schattschneider