Trump, Trudeau and NAFTA 2.0: tweak or transformation?

President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s first meeting was bound to make waves. Social media was fixated by which of the two statesman best managed the handshake. The prime minister was generally applauded for avoiding being hauled into thepresident’s physical sphere of influence. Images showed the two leaders at press podia and in armchairs by the Oval Office desk: separate but generally comfortable. It was not exactly the chummy camaraderie Trudeau enjoyed previously with President Barack Obama. And while there was no high-vaunting rhetoric to match John F. Kennedy’s 1961 encomium that ‘geography has made us neighbours, history has made us friends, economics has made uspartners, and necessity has made us allies’, the focus on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) certainly accentuated the challenges of geography and economics.