Abstract

The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) provided the first opportunity for the Trump administration to translate its "America First" trade policy into specific treaty design. In this article, we evaluate how radical these changes have been by systematically comparing the USMCA to its predecessors. We find that, first, the USMCA copies 57 percent of its text from the Transpacific Partnership (TPP), which Trump had repudiated and unsigned once he took office. Compared to U.S. treaty practice generally, the USCMA is more of a continuation rather than a departure from prior texts. ...