The United States (US) joined North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) trade regime along with Canada and Mexico to increase trade among members by reducing or eliminating trade restrictions such as tariffs and import quotas. Under the Trump administration, the United States-for the first time-proposed changes to NAFTA and stated it would leave NAFTA if the proposed changes were rejected. This research attempts to elaborate on the factors that influenced US renegotiation of NAFTA, which had

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... een implemented since 23 years. The realist and liberalist approaches are insufficient to explain such behavior because insufficient attention is paid to the role of ideas and social construction. Therefore, the theory used to answer the research question is the international regime theory: a weak cognitivist approach that considers that state behavior in a regime's order is generally based on the ideas and knowledge possessed by the state, the learning process, and the role of epistemic communities.