The stability Jamie Tronnes and Emily Kilcrease mourn is exactly the machine that spent thirty years transferring income from the factory floor to the quarterly report. In a National Review op-ed warning that Trump’s replacement tariffs will destabilize the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade pact, they lament the loss of “predictable rules,” argue that “rules-based trade” is the only way to counter China, and plead for Washington to stop thwacking its neighbors so the good work of upgrading the USMCA can proceed. The problem isn’t the forced-labor pretext, which is unserious. The problem is the entire premise: that the old predictability was good for anyone but the people who sign the checks.

I’ll concede their strongest point first. Tariffs are a blunt instrument, and slapping them on Canada and Mexico with a made-up justification really does corrode trust. A trade framework that changes by presidential tantrum makes it impossible for a factory manager in Ohio or a parts supplier in Ontario to plan a payroll. Stability has value, and the authors are right that the current chaos is bad for business. But “bad for business” is not the same as “bad for workers,” and the entire op-ed conflates the two. The stable framework they’re nostalgic for is the one that let corporations shove production across the border to capture a wage differential, then sell the finished goods back into the American market tariff-free, pocketing the spread. That machine ran on predictability. The rules were so clear that a finance VP could model the labor arbitrage to the penny and lock in a ten-year supply contract before the first concrete was poured. And that, the authors want you to believe, was stability worth keeping — a supply chain assembled on a wage spread, not a floor. The certainty was never for the worker whose job was about to vanish; it was for the shareholder who needed the earnings call to go smoothly. Anyway.

The “rules-based trade” they invoke is a lovely phrase. The rules, it turns out, were for capital to move freely; the “trade” was the workers being traded for cheaper ones. Capital got to shop for the cheapest regulatory climate the way you’d pick a new phone plan — all the choices, none of the obligations. The USMCA the first Trump administration hailed as a “gold standard” was, in its essential architecture, the same bargain NAFTA struck in 1994: free movement of capital, tightly controlled movement of labor, and a token side-agreement on labor standards that everyone knew was wallpaper. It did tighten rules of origin and included a rapid-response mechanism for Mexican labor violations, which is a genuine improvement — but only if enforced. The predictable rules the authors want to preserve are the ones that protect cross-border investment flows, not the ones that stop a maquiladora from paying poverty wages. If the goal is a “Fortress North America” to compete with China, the fortress needs walls that keep out wage suppression, not just Chinese steel. That requires rules with teeth, and the existing trade architecture has none.

The op-ed concedes that tariffs might be necessary against China, but insists they’re counterproductive against allies. This misses the deeper structural point. The American manufacturing base didn’t hollow out because of Chinese cheating; it hollowed out because the entire rules-based trading system, from the WTO to NAFTA to the USMCA, was designed to prioritize investor certainty over wage floors. The predictable rules Kilcrease and Tronnes champion are the very rules that made that capital flight not just legal but frictionless.

So what do we build on the ground where the old predictability stood? Not a permanent tariff regime run by presidential whim — that’s cronyism waiting to happen. The alternative is a set of binding labor and environmental standards that are as enforceable as the property-rights protections the trade agreements already contain. If a Canadian investor can sue a government for lost profits under an investor-state dispute mechanism, a Mexican autoworker should be able to trigger real penalties when her employer violates her right to organize. Sectoral wage floors — negotiated by unions and employers together, with government at the table — could set a baseline across the integrated auto supply chain, so no factory on the continent wins a contract by starving its workforce. That’s not a fantasy; the European Union has managed it for decades, and the North American auto pact once had something like it, where wage boards kept a C-class worker from being undercut by a plant two borders away.

You can run a continent-wide manufacturing base without a police state, and you can run it without a tariff war. But you cannot run it on the assumption that investment certainty is the only variable that matters. The authors want to set a “new high-water mark of rules.” Fine. Let’s set one for labor, and let’s make it as enforceable as the chapters on intellectual property. Until then, the predictable framework they’re selling is just the same old machine with a fresh coat of paint — the one that cut the paycheck and called it efficiency.

The threat to North American workers isn’t a president who tears up the rules. It’s a generation of policymakers who wrote the rules to serve capital and then called the resulting devastation a law of nature. Stability is only worth keeping if the floor under it stops the bleeding. The one Tronnes and Kilcrease want to preserve never did.