NAFTA only the start.

When NAFTA was being debated in the early 1990s, the American people were not told that the proposed arrangement would be the starting point for further political integration of Canada and Mexico with the United States. But the planners behind NAFTA had that goal in mind all along. NAFTA, with all its economic dislocations, was meant to be just the beginning of a larger plot. Speaking at the Canadian-American Business Council Luncheon on June 24, 2003 in Washington, D.C., then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald L. Evans, referring at the time to efforts to build a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), noted that NAFTA was only a starting point for regional integration. "NAFTA was just the beginning," Evans enthused. "President Bush has said that 'We have a great vision before us: a fully democratic hemisphere, bound together by good will and free trade.'"

The FTAA ran into intense opposition but internationalist planners didn't give up. Instead, following the motto that NAFTA is just a beginning, they hit upon a new plan: North American Union. In a 2005 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal obnoxiously entitled "North America the Beautiful," internationalist theorists John Manley, Pedro Aspe, and William Weld argued that, over the last decade, "the pace of economic integration within North America has outstripped the capacity of the Nafta framework." To rectify that, they proposed that the leaders of the NAFTA nations "should announce a plan to establish a North American security and economic community by 2010."

The op-ed came just a few days after a meeting on March 23, 2005 of the heads of state of the NAFTA nations. At the meeting, then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin joined with President Bush and former Mexican President Vicente Fox in taking the first step toward that economic community by constructing the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America--the next step on the road to a North America Union.

The economic dislocations of NAFTA have been terrible; just imagine how bad they will be under a more fully implemented plan for regional governance. If ever there was a time for the country to abandon NAFTA, now is that time--before the nation is maneuvered into a North American Union it can ill afford.