WCA 2026: U.S. Deputy Trade Rep. Jeffrey Goettman on Priorities in the Western Hemisphere
WCA 2026: U.S. Deputy Trade Rep. Jeffrey Goettman on Priorities in the Western Hemisphere
The senior official spoke of the Trump administration's approach to the USMCA review and trade with South America.
Speakers
- Jeffrey Goettman, Deputy U.S. Trade Trade Representative for Africa, the Western Hemisphere, Europe, the Middle East, the Environment, Labor, and Industrial Competitiveness
- Susan Segal, President and CEO, AS/COA (moderator)
"Reindustrialize America: That's what leads all of our efforts at USMCA. We're basically repudiating the status quo," said U.S. Trade Representative Jeffrey Goettman at the 56th Washington Conference on the Americas, in a fireside chat with AS/COA's Susan Segal.
In his remarks, Goettman explained that the main focus of the current U.S. trade policy is reducing the country's trade deficit and it rejects what he called a "post-industrial service economy." The Trump administraion has pivoted focus to reorienting trade deals from multilateral to bilateral, which "allow us to be specific about what we want, which is open markets and reciprocity."
That frame of thought is guiding Washington on the negotiations for U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Goettman explained, outlining that coming July 1, there is no chance of just moving forward with the current agreement as is. The main focus is improving rules of origin," he explained. Mexico is the United State's top trade partner, but it's also the third largest trade deficit for the United States, he explained, at $200 billion just behind China and the European Union. "We've got to be able to demonstrate through these improvements that we're making with USMCA that there's a path that the trade deficit is going to go down," Goettman said.
That doesn't mean the United States does not want to expand trade with countries in Latin America. Goettman spoke about U.S. interest in South American countries and how the office of the U.S. Trade Representative is trying to "gauge ambition" in the region at the same time it looks into sectors in which these countries and the United States overlap as agriculture, for example. The "biggest challenge," Goettman said, "is to find out what goods those can be that aren't competitive with domestic industry."
