A New North America: Cooperation and Enhanced Interdependence

A useful collection of seven essays on the prospects for increased cooperation between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Charles Doran and Sidney Weintraub stress the need to "deepen" the North American relationship before "widening" it to include other countries of the Western Hemisphere, on the plausible grounds that premature widening would derail the prospects for further cooperation within the framework of NAFTA. Several of the essays are much too narrow in focus. Drischler, for instance, confines his discussion to the effect of NAFTA on foreign direct investment in the United States, an approach that stands uncomfortably alongside the more comprehensive assessments of Mexican and Canadian perspectives by Delal Baer and Edward Safarian. Baer's essay is the best of the lot, though her assessment that U.S.-Mexican relations have entered a more treacherous phase is at odds with the sunnier perspectives of most of the other contributors.