Wake up Congress, our NAFTA partners are ramping up trade in Europe and the Pacific Rim Mexico and Canada are ramping up trade with Europe and the Pacific Rim as the U.S. looks inward. Congress must be willing to make concessions on NAFTA.

Jason Marczak | Opinion contributor

After a long, torturous renegotiation process, the prospect of a modernized NAFTA is finally on the horizon. But now is not the time to get comfortable. Not only are we not out of the woods yet, the most crucial part of this undertaking is upon us. And the stakes have changed mightily from when it began.

As Congress awaits the text of an agreement in principle — something that looks within reach yet this month — it’s worth looking at what our two neighbors have been doing on the sidelines since we started this process.

On April 21, Mexico and the European Union announced that they had reached an agreement on a bilateral trade deal. While it largely slipped under the radar in the US’ 24-hour news cycle, the announcement was plastered with great fanfare all over the Mexican press. And not without cause. The Mexico-EU FTA admittedly isn’t new — having been signed in 1997 — but last month’s agreement broadened its scope so massively that it might as well be.

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Originally a narrow deal covering mainly industrial goods and machinery, the free trade pact will soon come to eliminate tariffs on virtually all goods. The sweeping new agreement also includes provisions on telecommunications, financial services, and e-commerce, as well as robust investment promotion and anticorruption mechanisms.

The new deal, which Mexico’s foreign ministry hailed as “the most advanced of its type,” had long been a priority for Brussels. But it wasn’t until NAFTA became the target of attacks in Washington that Mexico began talking in earnest with the Europeans. Hedging against uncertainty from the U.S., our neighbor sought — successfully — to broaden its trade horizons, and it’s not alone in doing so.

Late last year, Canada made its own agreement with Europe, and it is already reaping the benefits. When we formally began NAFTA renegotiations, only 25% of Canadian goods could enter the EU duty-free. Today, Ottawa enjoys tariff exemptions on 98% of its exports to Europe — exports that are forecast to drive Canada's trade growth to almost double that of the U.S. this year.

And of course, Canada and Mexico’s trade diversification isn’t limited to the EU. Both of our NAFTA partners are now members of the resurrected Trans-Pacific Partnership. Rebranded as the CPTPP (or TPP-11 as a painful reminder of our absence), the pact will give Canadian and Mexican companies unfettered access to a massive new market along the Pacific Rim, the future axis of world trade.

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As we turn our sights inwards, our neighbors to the North and the South have been turning theirs to the East and the West. The result is a different playing field than that which existed a year ago. At the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, we’ve spent the past five years working to bring Europe and Asia into policymakers’ understanding of this hemisphere. A chronic failure to do so has long hampered Washington’s approach to the Americas.

Now, as a new NAFTA nears its final stages, Congress can’t afford to keep these blinders on. While geography has granted us a privileged position with regard to Canada and Mexico, in an increasingly globalized world, it no longer guarantees us supremacy. When the text of a revised NAFTA finally lands on their desks, our representatives and senators should keep in mind how much has changed in the neighborhood. Our two partners will have little interest in renegotiating ad infinitum. They have more options now.

This is not to say that Congress should rubber-stamp whatever deal is drawn up, simply that our lawmakers should eschew the all-or-nothing mentality that has overtaken our politics. When 27% of global GDP is at play, there can be no such thing as a “perfect” trade pact. But if Congress is willing to make concessions just like the American, Mexican and Canadian negotiators have done, the elusive promise of a “NAFTA 2.0” may just become reality.

Jason Marczak is director of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center. Follow him on Twitter: @JMarczak.