t it is clear that U.S. industry as a whole has not packed up and crossed the border, or the ocean.However, not all proponents of international agreements believe that regional alliances such as NAFTA and the proposed Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific groups are the right approach. Such alliances have the potential to turn into their own protectionist units (much as the European Union is doing) and to work against free trade between alliance and alliance, while they help foster free trade within a given alliance.Economists and other interested parties who want to see the world move as close to a pure free-trade policy as politically feasible recommend minimizing or ditching regional alliances and giving more and more power to the WTO to oversee genuine worldwide trade, rather than region-by-region agreements. This allows some regulations to protect the environment, the quality of the workplace, etc., without reforming the current set of nations into a smaller and more powerful set of trading partners, working generally in the interest of their richest and most powerful member nations.Proponents of the overall world model fear, for example, that NAFTA can become an "extended U.S.A." when trading with the European Union, so that the United States will use the added economic clout of Canada and Mexico as a club to beat the Europeans. (And, in fact, the ability of the European Union to do precisely the same thing in reverse was one of the major factors which convinced the United States to accept NAFTA.)Nationalists, on the other hand, frequently prefer the benefits of managed alliances, feeling that their own country is more likely to have global interests in common with its neighbors or specific trading partners than with a truly worldwide system. Also, pulling out of a worldwide system in case of local war, shift in national policy, or for any other reason, is much harder than pulling out of one, or even a group, of regional alliances--ano...
