United States President, Donald Trump, renewed his threat to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement and ripped on trading partners Canada and Mexico in a tweet early on Sunday.
This is coming days before the three countries were scheduled to hold a second round of negotiations on rewriting the 23-year-old agreement.
Trump wrote: “We are in the NAFTA (worst trade deal ever made) renegotiation process with Mexico & Canada. Both being very difficult may have to terminate?”
Trump, a Republican, promised during his campaign to overhaul or eliminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he cast as killing jobs and exacerbating the US deficit, and to adopt a more protectionist stance for trade generally.
The first five-day round of talks among the three countries concluded last Sunday, with all sides committing to follow an accelerated process in revamping the agreement.
It was originally signed by former President, Bill Clinton, a Democrat, whose wife, former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, ran against Trump in the 2016 election.
Going into the five-day round of negotiations starting September 1 in Mexico, Trump has kept the heat turned up.
Both Mexico and Canada have dismissed his musing in a Tuesday speech that “we’ll end up probably terminating NAFTA at some point” as a negotiating tactic.