Mexico’s Price to Keep the USMCA Alive: Subservience or Strategic Autonomy?

According to the new foreign policy priorities followed by the United States, Washington has ceased to be the "Atlas" that upheld the post-Cold War world order. Now, the ultimate goal is to look after the country's own interests, to make it even more powerful economically, technologically, and militarily. In this context, Trump has turned trade policy and the alliances forged in the past into instruments of coercion to obtain transactional benefits. Facing the North American commercial partners, he has made regional integration and the USMCA – an agreement he himself negotiated in 2018 – a straitjacket to obtain greater unilateral concessions and align them in his technological and commercial rivalry against China, under the assumption that the commercial alliance is more important to them than to Americans.

So far, Canada has responded with retaliatory measures to the tariffs imposed by Trump and has proposed a "values-based realistic" foreign policy that establishes alliances with countries willing to build a new global order that is more just, equitable, sustainable, and with respected multilateral rules. In contrast, Mexico has not yet imposed any retaliatory measures and has instead accepted all conditions imposed by Trump to ensure the continuity of the USMCA. This presentation will analyze what is at stake behind the review of the trade agreement, as well as the limits and challenges that Mexico currently faces for the agreement to remain favorable to its interests.

Isidro Morales is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the quarterly journal Latin American Policy, distributed globally by Wiley, external fellow of the United States-Mexico Center of the Baker Institute at Rice University, National Emeritus Researcher at CONAHCYT, and professor of International Relations at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla.

He is the author of books on the Mexican oil industry and Mexico’s geo-economic and geopolitical integration in North America, as well as several specialized articles on trade integration, security, energy and strategic relations in North America, and political theory and international relations, published in Mexico and abroad in specialized journals and books. Dr. Morales is a graduate of El Colegio de México and obtained his PhD in International Relations from the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. Dr. Morales is the Fulbright-García Robles Mexico Studies Chair for Spring 2026 at CLAIS.