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WASHINGTON — President Trump said Monday that the revised North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada would pour “cash and jobs” into the United States. But the deal’s importance may have less to do with the details than the signal it sends that Mr. Trump is methodically settling his multifront trade war to fight a single enemy: China.
A jubilant Mr. Trump celebrated the new Nafta agreement as the fulfillment of a bedrock campaign promise. He claimed it was a vindication of his aggressive use of tariffs and vowed to keep imposing them to extract deals from other trading partners, like the European Union and Japan.
But while Mr. Trump expressed confidence about eventually reaching deals with Europe and Japan, he was far more grudging about China, saying it was too soon to begin talking. Administration officials say privately that Mr. Trump is content to leave tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods in place for the foreseeable future to weaken its hand.
“China wants to talk very badly,” Mr. Trump said at a news conference in the White House Rose Garden. “I said frankly it’s too early to talk, because they’re not ready.” He added, “If politically, people force it too quickly, you’re not going to make the right deal.”
The updated Nafta, which will be called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or U.S.M.C.A., represents Mr. Trump’s biggest trade achievement to date, and it comes after more than a year of intense negotiations that frequently fell into personal rancor between Mr. Trump and the leaders of Canada and Mexico.
After languishing for weeks, negotiations with Canada suddenly broke through Friday morning, according to a senior American official. The Trump administration, having received a detailed proposal from Canadian officials the day before, submitted a counteroffer, which the Canadians accepted in principle.
With a deal safely in hand, Mr. Trump lavished praise on Mexico’s outgoing president, Enrique Peña Nieto, with whom he had tangled repeatedly over the phone. He was less effusive about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, but suggested their Cold War was over, too. It was not personal, Mr. Trump suggested about both men; it was just business.
“We had very strong tensions,” Mr. Trump said. “It was just an unfair deal, whether it was Mexico or Canada, and now it’s a fair deal for everybody. It’s a much different deal. It’s a brand-new deal. It’s not Nafta redone.”
Still, like some of Mr. Trump’s other accomplishments in business and government, the deal is partly a step forward and partly an exercise in rebranding.
Canada will ease longstanding protections on its dairy market and provide access greater than what the United States would have gained through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade treaty negotiated by President Barack Obama, from which Mr. Trump withdrew last year.
The United States relented on its demand to eliminate an independent tariff dispute settlement system that Canada had said was a red line. Preserving it was a major concession for the United States, which had eliminated the mechanism, known as Chapter 19, as part of its deal with Mexico.
The pact also makes a series of changes to areas like intellectual property and the digital economy, including protections for patents and domain names — all of which refresh Nafta, a 25-year-old pact that had become somewhat outmoded in the digital age.
But many of these innovations were drawn from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which included Canada and Mexico, and it prompted a senior Trump adviser to offer a rare endorsement of an Obama legacy achievement that Mr. Trump delighting in dismantling.
“We’re building on what was done in T.P.P.,” said Robert Lighthizer, the United States trade representative. “I’m in no way trying to knock the people that negotiated T.P.P.”
But he added, “Because we had the benefit of that, our agreement is substantially better than T.P.P.”
Mr. Lighthizer pointed to changes in regulations governing automobile manufacturing, which he said would bring more car production back to the United States. Under the agreement, a greater percentage of vehicles would have to be made in North America to qualify for Nafta’s zero tariffs.
A significant portion of the vehicles would also have to be assembled by workers earning at least $16 an hour — a wage floor intended to increase jobs in the United States and Canada, where wages are higher than in Mexico. While inflation will erode this wage protection over time, officials noted that the pact’s terms could be reviewed every six years.
Analysts said the agreement might have an incremental impact on American automotive jobs, and might push car prices slightly higher. But Ford Motor Company said in a statement that it was “encouraged” by the accord, noting that a three-nation trade zone “will support an integrated, globally competitive automotive business in North America.”
The United Steelworkers union urged caution, lamenting that the Trump administration’s steel and aluminum tariffs had not been lifted as part of the deal. The commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, described those as “separate issues,” and Mexico and Canada say they expect those tariffs to be worked out on a separate track. Mr. Trump said the United States was talking with Mexico and Canada about potentially replacing them with quotas. Also unresolved is whether Canada and Mexico will continue retaliatory tariffs on American products like whiskey, orange juice and chocolate.
Mr. Trump must now submit the deal to Congress, where a potential change in control from Republicans to Democrats could throw its passage into doubt. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, made clear on Monday that Mr. Trump’s deal would not receive a rubber stamp.
But the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, offered a rare endorsement of Mr. Trump’s approach.
“As someone who voted against Nafta and opposed it for many years, I knew it needed fixing. The president deserves praise for taking large steps to improve it,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement. He cautioned, though, that “any final agreement must be judged on how it benefits and protects middle-class families and the working people in our country.”
Experts on trade delivered a mixed verdict on the agreement. Parts of it, they said, were a much-needed update to Nafta. But other parts could restrict trade in a way that would ultimately hurt American consumers and increase uncertainty for American companies.
“He started this conflagration with Mexico and Canada, as he has with other trading partners,” said Daniel M. Price, a former trade adviser to President George W. Bush. “That he may put out the fires after they have destroyed significant acreage does not vindicate either the strategy or the result.”
The White House is moving on several fronts to settle the trade disputes Mr. Trump started. Last week, Mr. Trump signed a revised trade agreement with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. He and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan agreed to begin talks on a deal, after months of resistance by Tokyo.
“They finally got their act together and decided they can’t win all these wars, so they’re settling many of them and focusing on China,” said Gary Clyde Hufbauer, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “They’re lining up the ducks for this gigantic battle with China.”
There are no plans for trade negotiations between China and the United States, although the president’s chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, said Mr. Trump might meet President Xi Jinping of China at a summit meeting in Argentina in late November.
On Monday, Mr. Trump raised the prospect of even more tariffs against China and said his actions were taking a toll on the Chinese economy.
Although he voiced hopes about a deal with the European Union — and praised Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president with whom he agreed to hold off on auto tariffs — White House officials said the negotiations with Europe would be arduous.
Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, played a significant role in smoothing over the final sticking points between the United States and Canada, according to officials. He met informally with the Canadian foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, during the transition, and kept in touch with her, even as Mr. Trump’s relationship with Mr. Trudeau became fraught.
“The relationship that we’ve been able to build with the countries established a lot of trust, both with the Canadians and Mexicans,” Mr. Kushner told reporters. “It was through that trust that we were able to talk about a lot of these issues.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Trudeau spoke by telephone Monday morning, though Mr. Trudeau later dodged questions about whether the agreement would restore his relationship with the president.
“The relationship between the U.S. and Canadians is much deeper than just the relationship between two individuals who happen to be prime minister and president,” Mr. Trudeau said.
At the White House on Monday, Mr. Trump exulted in the abbreviation for the new agreement, U.S.M.C.A., which he predicted that “99 percent of the time we’ll be hearing.”
That rebranding, however, may prove to be one of Mr. Trump’s biggest challenges. Even in his briefing with reporters afterward, Mr. Lighthizer, a veteran trade lawyer, referred to the deal as Nafta.
Neal E. Boudette in Ann Arbor, Mich., contributed reporting.