Hitting NAFTA on the Button

Day in and day out, no foreign country has more political and business dealings with the United States than our southern neighbor, Mexico. The only nation with a comparable foreign-policy profile is Canada. Yet it is surprising how often both neighboring countries are taken for granted by Washington, which usually has its foreign-policy vision focused on horizons much further away than Mexico City or Ottawa.

That’s why it was reassuring Monday that both President Clinton and Secretary of State Warren Christopher saw fit to use a regular meeting of U.S. and Mexican Cabinet-level ministers to speak out forcefully, and even eloquently, on behalf of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement. Such firm support for NAFTA, which would phase out tariff barriers in all three countries and create a free market from the Yucatan to the Yukon, has been much needed from both the White House and the State Department.

NAFTA, due to come before Congress later this year, would help regulate a very useful process of economic integration that is well under way--and even accelerating. Even so, its approval is by no means assured. Special-interest groups are determined to either delay the agreement or nit-pick it to death. That would be a political mistake of historic proportions.

As Christopher said Monday, Congress’ vote on NAFTA will be “the most important signal the United States sends to Mexico and all of Latin America . . . this decade.” Approval would show that, after decades of urging other Western Hemisphere nations to open their borders to U.S. goods and services, this country has the confidence to open its own economy to more foreign competition, to benefit all consumers.

Later, in a telephone interview, Clinton again expressed his support, this time in a more down-to-earth but equally valid fashion. He told Los Angeles radio station KABC that NAFTA would not only help the many California businesses that rely on foreign trade but bring closer the day when a thriving Mexican economy will dissuade workers from illegally crossing the international border to find jobs in the United States.

Both good points, very well put. And both, we hope, just the start of a campaign by the Clinton Administration to push this fundamentally important trade agreement.