Well, sort of. Here's what Lori Wallach of Global Trade Watch says in relation to the Mexico Trucking dispute:
until the safety situation improves, Congress must not allow Mexico-domiciled trucks onto American roads. At the same time, Mexico is far from being able to meet key truck and driver safety standards. Yet, NAFTA provides Mexico a right of access and obligates the U.S. - thus the indefinite sanctions.
So what's to be done? Just around the corner from the irony of a trade pact leading to higher tariffs is the answer: negotiations to remove the trucking access obligation and swap it for something else. In trade terms, this is called negotiated compensation.
That is how USTR Kirk ended almost a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars in trade sanctions related to a U.S. WTO win against Europe's ban on artificial beef growth hormones. All those U.S. tariffs and years later, European politicians preferred to live with indefinite sanctions and avoid meeting sharpened forks and knives - and unfavorable election returns - from a European public opposed to what it considered unsafe food additives. So, the U.S. agreed to trade the sanctions against Europe for...more trade with Europe! (Better access for non-hormone beef.)
Congress and the American public are not going to budge on NAFTA trucks. So, let the NAFTA fixing begin. Members of Congress have been calling for that approach all year.
So it's just a call for compensation as an alternative to opening up the trucking services market, rather than actual additional trade liberalization. But still, it's better than rolling back past liberalization, which they sometimes seem to advocate, so in that sense it's an improvement!
