POLITICO: Ross calls NAFTA withdrawal ‘right thing’ to do if 2.0 talks fail

09/19/2017

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By: MEGAN CASSELLA 

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Friday backed President Donald Trump’s ever-present threat of terminating NAFTA, saying that withdrawal would be “the right thing” to do if trilateral talks between Mexico, Canada and the U.S. are not successful.

Ross noted that even though the renegotiation is in its early stages, the Trump administration still views the end of the year as the deadline for talks to wrap up. He argued that the process can’t “drag on too long” beyond that, because if it did, negotiators would run into delays amid elections in all three countries and the expiration of Trade Promotion Authority in the U.S.

“As you get closer to all of those political dates, the ability to get anything done will go down,” he said at an event hosted by The Washington Post. “So there’s no fine line, magic tape, but more or less by the end of the year is probably where we’re going to need to know where we are.”

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