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NAFTA: Integrating Mexico or Exploiting it?
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When the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War finally rolled over, the United States emerged the victor. And with it, the notions of democracy, capitalism and constitutional law achieved hegemony on a global scale. The nation-building siege perpetrated by two battling superpowers was, at least on a superficial ideological level, a showdown between totalitarian communism and electoral democracy. So an American victory implied to many a validation of all those values for which the Cold War had been fought. This philosophical resolution, crossbred with a vacuum in adversarial power, has given way to the twenty-first century American crusade. Labeled imperialism and colonialism by critics, the overarching aspiration in determining U.S. behavior on an international scale is regarded as globalism by idealists. In particular, those in service of America on a level of federal governance tend to refer this way to the economic, military and diplomatic initiatives that make up our foreign policy. Underlying the globalism term is the tenet that all efforts which can be parlayed into bringing America’s progress to the rest of world need be employed. At its extreme, globalism can result in the type of aggression that we’ve witnessed most recently in both Iraq and Afghanistan, where America operated on the pretense that both backwards nations would be kicked up to speed by the intervention. But even prior to President Bush’s decidedly confrontational methods of globalization, the United States took advantage of the Cold War’s aftermath to make quick headway on its own continental body. During the Clinton administration, the United States sought to extend the prominence of its authority by drafting the North American Free Trade Agreement. Essentially an extension of the Canada Free Trade Agreement of 1988, NAFTA brought the gradually developing Mexico into the fold. Both agreements were centered on the notion of lessening and eliminating financial trade barriers between the three nations. Essentially a bill of deregulation, NAFTA promulgated a timeline on which all trade tariffs—some outright and some gradually over a space of five, ten or fifteen years—would be lessened or eliminated. The intent was to create a free flow of trade in North America, breaking down many of the factors that prevented unencumbered exchange between Canada, Mexico and the United States. NAFTA was not an entirely new phenomenon of global integration as it followed in the footsteps of the Canadian agreement in which many deregulatory measures of the same nature were enacted. Likewise, it bolstered a Mexican economic liberalization that began in earnest in the early eighties, where the relationship between Mexico and the international trade community began to undergo a legitimate intimation. So in 1993, as the Clinton administration started to rev its engine over the introduction of the NAFTA arrangement, it already was a foregone conclusion in many ways that the integration of the three major North American economies was edging toward ever more inextricable cohesion.
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