The negotiations that remade the North American Free Trade Agreement were, as one participant put it, a series of “near-death” experiences. For more than a year, starting in 2017, envoys from the United States, Canada, and Mexico met to determine the future of a trade alliance worth trillions of dollars. They clashed over everything from labor laws to the minutiae of duty-free imports, while repeatedly deflecting President Donald Trump’s threats to withdraw from the agreement. In the fall of 2018, they were finally prepared to sign what came to be known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement. First, though, they needed to decide how long the accord should last.

NAFTA was what is called a “forever deal”—as with all of America’s major trade agreements, its terms were permanently fixe

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