Politicians on both the political left and the political right have been attacking free trade and demanding the renegotiation of trade agreements. The assumption behind these attacks seems to be that the rules of the international trade system are harmful to the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the years since NAFTA, U.S. trade with its North American neighbors has more than tripled, growing more rapidly than U.S. trade with the rest of the world. Canada and Mexico are the two largest destinations for U.S. exports, accounting for more than a third of the total. Most estimates conclude that the deal had a modest but positive impact on U.S. GDP of less than 0.5 percent, or a total addition of up to $80 billion dollars to the U.S. economy upon full implementation, or several billion dollars of added growth per year.