Art of the free-trade deal doesn't require losers

President Trump, author of the Art of the Deal, famously loves to negotiate and renegotiate. During the campaign, we heard endlessly his promises to renegotiate various treaties and agreements, including the Iran deal and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The president is also extraordinarily competitive and obsessed with winning. He makes this evident by continuing to bring up his November 2016 election victory, and his earlier primary victories, at every opportunity, even a year or more later.

A desire to win and experience in negotiation can both be excellent traits for a president. But the White House's NAFTA renegotiations suggest a problem. The president wrongly sees international trade as a zero-sum game and appears dead set on America winning by defeating Mexico and Canada.

The president and his officials are too prone to seeing the nations with whom we trade as enemies who must be vanquished, when in truth they are commercial partners with whom we have mutually beneficial exchange relations. The skewed White House view is clear in some of its demands, such as that a tariff should be imposed on any car with less than 50 percent American content.

What would this achieve other than the president's psychic satisfaction in trumpeting the fact that Mexico and Canada are the junior partners in NAFTA. This doesn't seem worth the continental disruption that the demanded tariff would cause to the auto industry.