McCain attacks Obama’s ‘cowboy diplomacy’

John McCain has accused Barack Obama of “cowboy diplomacy” over free trade that threatened to undermine relations with Canada and reverse the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Republican presidential candidate made the attack before heading to Ottawa on Friday for a speech championing the virtues of free trade.

Writing in the Detroit Free Press, Mr McCain said it would be the “height of economic and foreign policy irresponsibility” to demand renegotiation of Nafta, as Mr Obama proposed in February.

Mr McCain said Mr Obama was wrong to have argued that Nafta had “devastating” consequences for US communities. “What truly would be devastating is to jeopardise the trade expansion of Nafta through a misguided, isolationist impulse that would inevitably and understandably alienate a key partner like Canada.”

Mr Obama acknowledged this week that the rhetoric on free trade had become “overheated and amplified” during the primaries and appeared to back away from his threat to renegotiate Nafta unilaterally. “I’m not a big believer in doing things unilaterally,” he told Fortune magazine.

In his speech to business leaders in Ottawa, Mr McCain promised to lead an “outward-looking America”.

“Demanding unilateral changes and threatening to abrogate an agreement that has increased trade and prosperity is nothing more than retreating behind protectionist walls,” he said, without mentioning Mr Obama by name.

The Arizona senator noted that Canada was the biggest US export market and that two-way trade across the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Canada was equal to all US exports to Japan. But he warned that the costs of complying with Nafta rules and regulations threatened to become the equivalent of a tariff.