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Trump’s decision on tariffs came on Thursday in the middle of talks, catching negotiators off guard. On Sunday, Trump’s senior trade advisers said the president doesn’t want any nation excluded from the tariffs, set to be imposed as early as this week. Canada, the biggest supplier of steel and aluminum to the U.S., and Mexico, the No. 4 source of steel, have asked to be excluded, and both indicated they will strike back if Trump includes them in the stiff duties.

At the NAFTA talks in Mexico City, negotiators agreed on two more topic areas and discussed details of Canada’s idea to redraw the way regional content for cars is measured. Yet work on the autos issue, which may hold the key to the entire deal, has been slow. It now looks impossible for negotiators to meet their goal of getting an agreement by the end of this month, especially amid the prospect of escalating trade tensions from the steel dispute.

“I applaud the president for targeting unfairly traded steel and aluminum,” Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told reporters in Mexico City on Sunday. “But blanket tariffs that also sweep up fairly traded steel and aluminum, especially with trading partners like Canada and Mexico — they should be excluded.”

Progress was made on the “nuts and bolts” of a new NAFTA deal, Brady said after being briefed.

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Trump’s announcement that he plans to impose tariffs of 25 per cent on imported steel and 10 per cent on aluminum landed like a bombshell during the seventh round of NAFTA talks, prompting expletives from a least one negotiator and casting a pall over the painstaking efforts to update the 24-year-old deal.