Duncan Wood on What the Trump Administration Should Focus on in the First 100 Days

Just building on what Robert’s said -- while we’ve been sitting here, the Senate’s confirmed Rex Tillerson -- that’s good news, it means that a team will begin to take shape at State Department; ideally we’ll see the same thing going on at Commerce. You know, we have a number of people in the administration, in cabinet positions, who are friends of Mexico, who have expressed that they understand how important Mexico is.

What I would really like to see is, not what necessarily Mexico wants to see, which is they want to see this all to be resolved in a hundred days -- I think that would probably be the worst idea, because that would not be a good result for Mexico, we want to deliberate. What I want to see in the first hundred days is actually what President Trump promised on the campaign trail, which was that he would ask the ITC to conduct a study of the pros and cons of NAFTA. I think we do actually need an impartial evaluation of what the United States gets and loses from the North American Free Trade Agreement. That would be a very welcome and worthwhile study, so that we can base any decisions that we have to make in the future on facts, not on the opinions or on campaign promises, and that is something that I think we really need to remind the administration about.