so, what is the trump administration, rather than trump himself, going to push on nafta, in the end? i think that the chances are that the confluence of policies on the tpp and nafta is going to piss you off that much more. you thought you were going to maybe get a win on this right? ha.

see, the way you manipulate trump into doing what you want on this is that you feed him tpp provisions as improvements to nafta. in the end, "renegotiating nafta and cancelling the tpp" morphs into "replacing nafta with the tpp".

he won't know that they're tpp revisions, because he doesn't actually know what was actually in the tpp. i'll repeat that he wouldn't have actually opposed the tpp if he understood it. the one concrete difference may be in throwing the geo-strategic and security-minded people out of the trade policy discussions, but that will just mean pursuing the same outcomes in two different processes. that sounds like the kind of thing that billionaires want to bicker over. people pushing for this point may win this battle.

i'm actually interested to see how well this works in reconverting republican voters, at least, back to trade orthodoxy, which has to be a key social engineering goal in the party, right now. i expect that the left won't fall for it. and, it would actually be nice for the left to get it's issue back, actually - these anti-globalization groups on the right are not temporary allies. we need to resurrect the kind of trade politics on the left that we had in the 90s; this was an effective vehicle for mobilization, before the war broke it up. now, the right has taken it. and, it's a neat trick, right? if it works, you end up with these typical clueless anti-everything trump voters actually providing the political cover for the tpp, because they think passing tpp revisions is dismantling nafta. and, don't think they won't fall for it. after all: they're in favour of the aca, and opposed to obamacare. this is considerably more complicated, and that much easier to hoodwink them with.

remember when we stopped pipa and sopa? they were actually both in the tpp, though. and, expect them both to resurface in nafta talks.

i know that everybody wants to be optimistic on this. and, i think there's some chance that the one thing we could get some concrete wins on is in curbing the isds powers, as that fits into trump's economic nationalism - we can play this game ourselves, in pushing the idea that the isds process harms american sovereignty, which is absolutely true. it's been awful for canadian sovereignty, certainly. unions and other left-leaning forces that have a voice should prioritize this, as they can win this.

but, brace yourself - because if you get your hopes up, you're going to get crushed.