President Joseph Biden’s model of imperial reconstruction has placed dynamite on the bilateral bridges with Mexico; and it will be up to the White House if it blows them up. In the end, the most affected will be the US due to the geopolitical isolation in the Latin American and Caribbean region, the migratory and drug trafficking conflicts and the 2024 US presidential elections with a Donald Trump capitalizing on the mistakes.
Mexico does not have much to lose. The trade agreement will remain in force and will have to face conflicts in courts that could last for years of litigation. The US trade representative is scaring with the dead man’s bag of 10,000 million dollars in damages, but it would not be an amount to recover. Washington’s trade aggressions will affect Mexico’s economic stability and, paradoxically, will turn into social pressures on the border due to increased unemployment and illegal migration.
The strategic factor that changed the meaning of the bicentennial understanding was Russia’s war in Ukraine based on Biden’s geopolitical definition at the Munich meeting in January 2021 announcing the return of the United States to world leadership. Washington needs all of Latin America and the Caribbean, as in 1962 in Cuba, to break relations with Russia, although more as a message than as an effective decision. Like President López Mateos in 1962, Mexico assumes its diplomatic autonomy based on Mexican interests. On that date, the White House threatened retaliation against Mexico, but at the decisive moment it preferred to assume diplomatic defeat.
President López Obrador seems to be playing with the same extreme strategic scenarios; A stable Mexico with free trade is in Washington’s interest rather than provocations that could nullify the validity of the globalizing Treaty, especially now that Mexico has returned to being the US’s main trading partner.
In terms of real politik, the Mexican acceptance of sanctions against Russia will not change the world geopolitical scenario at all due to the much lower weight of Mexico, despite, even, its participation in the UN Security Council. Removing Russia from that elite group that maintains the precarious global balance would generate more positional wars in areas of the world where the Russia-EU conflict is still latent.
The White House is risking the traditional strategy of tension with Mexico. The failure of the visit by climate change commissioner John Kerry affected the US more than Mexico. Deep down, the US is not concerned about Mexico’s weight in climate change because since when it should have broken off relations, but the Mexican industrial reconversion requires funds that the US does not want to risk.
The issue of companies affected by the electricity law appears as a high risk in bilateral relations; President López Obrador has given very clear signs of his priorities and in this sense the threats will not cause setbacks in the nationalist effect of the annulment of leonine contracts. In the end, the nationalist approach is an essential part of the systemic redefinitions of the López Obrador presidential project that –and this would be the deepest message– could be decisive in the Mexican presidential succession in Morena.
President Biden, unlike President Trump, does not understand the nationalist springs of operation of Mexican decisions vis-à-vis US interests. Trump threatened in 2020 with tariff penalties to force Mexico to contain migrant caravans, but he did not go beyond his bilateral objective. Biden, on the other hand, wants the whole enchilada and is meeting with the obstinacy of a Mexican president who knows how to contain the desire for domination of the United States.
President López Obrador’s direct response to Kerry and trade representative Katherine Tai left Biden without arguments and strengthened the nationalist spirit of bilateral relations that President Salinas de Gortari had delivered to the White House to sign the Treaty under the strategic terms of the Negroponte Memorandum that has been recalled here and that gave a geopolitical focus to trade relations:
“The proposal for an FTA is in some way the stone that culminates and ensures these policies (Salinas’ neoliberal reformists). From a foreign policy perspective, an FTA would institutionalize the acceptance of a US orientation in Mexico’s foreign relations.
In this sense, the electricity law is an obstacle to imposing the US orientation in Mexico’s foreign relations.
policy for dummies: The politics between an ant and the elephant is a survival strategy.
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