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Kearns said that even a good NAFTA would provide little relief given the sustained threat that American manufacturers face from predatory trade practices of China, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian countries.

“A country with the economy the size of Mexico, or Canada for that matter — Americans are not going to get rich off of exporting to them,” he said.

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Even analysts who believe NAFTA has delivered a great deal of benefit to the United States argue that it could use updating. Bryan Riley, a senior trade policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation’s Institute for Economic Freedom and Opportunity, noted that Google, Netflix, the iPhone, and virtually the entire world of e-commerce did not exist when NAFTA took effect.

Modernizing the agreement to cover, say, digital trade would be fairly straightforward, Riley said.

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“That could be done fairly fast, and the goal should not be something that would be dragged out,” he said. “I don’t think [Trump] needs to blow the whole thing up and start over to fulfill his campaign promise.”

A substantial rewrite would be much harder, particularly with Mexico’s presidential election and the U.S. midterm elections coming up next year, Bryan said.

Tonelson agreed that negotiations for a comprehensive NAFTA redo could take a while. But he noted that the United States has an economy that is much larger than Canada and Mexico combined.

“The United States has such overwhelming leverage that if it’s used properly, Canada and Mexico would have no choice but to go along,” he said.[lz_pagination]