On Wednesday — exactly six years to the day after the USMCA took effect — the White House declined to renew it. The deal that was supposed to replace NAFTA and fix decades of lopsided trade with Mexico... is now on a 10-year countdown to expiration.

Here’s what most people miss. In 1993, the year before NAFTA started, the United States actually ran a $1.7 billion surplus with Mexico. We sold them more than they sold us. Then NAFTA kicked in. By 2000, that surplus had flipped to a $25 billion deficit. By 2017, when the first Trump administration promised to fix it, the hole had grown to $69 billion.

So we got the USMCA. The “best trade deal ever written,” we were told. New rules on auto parts. New labor standards. New enforcement mechanisms. And what happened? The deficit with Mexico didn’t shrink. It nearly tripled — from $69 billion when Trump first took office to $197 billion last year.

And here’s the part that really gets me. When you add Canada, the combined USMCA deficit hit $245 billion in 2025 — up from $85 billion in 2017. That’s a 187% increase during the very years the deal was supposed to be working.

Now... trade deficits aren’t automatically bad. They can mean Americans are buying things they want at good prices. But when the gap grows that fast — $128 billion wider in just eight years — it tells you something about where the factories are, where the jobs went, and who’s building the supply chains. Mexico is now the number one U.S. trading partner in goods. Not China. Mexico.

Walking away from the deal doesn’t end it immediately. The USMCA stays in force until 2036. But it starts a clock — and it tells you this White House believes the deal it wrote didn’t deliver what was promised. That’s a rare admission.

If you own anything tied to cross-border supply chains — auto stocks, industrials, retailers who source from Mexico — the next 10 years of renegotiation matter. This isn’t a done deal. It’s the start of a new fight. Worth asking your advisor what’s in your portfolio that runs through Monterrey. This weekend, not next month.