When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo faced a migrant crisis on the southern frontier, he did not hesitate to play his best card. Negotiating with Mexico’s Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard in November 2018, Pompeo minced no words.
“Marcelo, here’s the deal,” the secretary recounted in his memoirs, “if in fourteen days State and DHS can’t return nearly every single asylum claimant to Mexico, we are going to completely shut down the Mexican border.”
It was a classic border leverage moment that got results. Under pressure, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) put aside his deeply held personal antipathy towards the gringos and immediately agreed to the “re in Mexico” policy. The Mexican president’s interest, above all, was protecting profits from legal commerce moving north. AMLO’s quixotic ideological notions about the “human right to migrate” were tossed aside in a heartbeat.
That moment established the central principle for our next president in managing complicated U.S.–Mexican relations: No diplomatic tool commands Mexico’s attention better than closing the border. With over 100,000 American deaths from fentanyl yearly and literally millions of illegal migrants crossing the border under the Biden administration, there should be no debate on that matter. By gatekeeping our southern border, a new president can, and must, leverage Mexico’s greatest national asset—i.e., its legal access to cross the U.S. land frontier—to compel our proud and stubborn neighbor’s security cooperation.
Secretary Pompeo helped to prove the wisdom of this strategy. That’s why it was disconcerting to read Mr. Pompeo in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, in which he sounded more like a former Bush or Obama secretary of state than Trump’s. Pompeo’s concern in the WSJ article was not the border, but instead micromanaging governance issues inside Mexico that could affect the future of the U.S.–Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
Mr. Pompeo fears that AMLO, and later President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum, are engaging in Mexican domestic policies that will threaten USMCA renewal in 2026. While those concerns, in the abstract, are certainly valid, American security policymakers need to be planning and advocating a Manhattan Project–style endeavor to secure and control the border. To that end, they should also be asking larger questions, such as, what actually is the role of USMCA in helping to leverage the Mexicans to action in addressing the catastrophic bilateral security situation?
USMCA may or may not be integrated into the solution, but too many American businesspeople want to separate U.S.–Mexican commerce from bilateral security concerns. It is the same short-sighted approach that underlay U.S.–China commercial relations for three decades, until Washington finally recognized the folly of that strategy. Mexico is obviously not China, but it presents real security concerns that the American business community tends to ignore.
This business attitude, as typified by the WSJ, seems to be that commercial growth in trade is always good no matter the unanticipated consequences for U.S. national security.
It is, of course, certainly possible that corruption and criminal impunity inside Mexico might be contained, or even become diminished, as bilateral economic enterprise expands. The three-decade NAFTA record, although accompanied by massive economic growth in Mexico, indicates that was not the case.
It is just as likely that Mexico’s corruption and organized crime problems may continue to move north and further infect American institutions. Americans need to put aside their own hubris to consider that possibility. What is certain is that Mexico’s underlying transnational crime and corruption rot has shown no signs of improvement, no matter how much bilateral trade expands.
Pompeo’s WSJ article, in raising concerns about USMCA, harkens back to an outdated American policy vis-a-vis our southern neighbor that overvalued the impact of U.S. foreign assistance in making Mexico’s shaky democratic institutions function better.
For example, Pompeo denounces AMLO’s plans to change the Mexican constitution to allow for the popular election of judges. Most American conservatives would also see this proposal as a bad idea, because it will likely help move the courts to the political left.
That said, it is not as if the country’s current judicial system actually functions. Mexico does not have an independent judiciary that reliably resolves private disputes for ordinary Mexicans. Foreign investors do not litigate in Mexico courts; they insist on arbitration. The criminal courts are even more of a disaster.
Not sounding at all like the Trump administration’s realpolitik practitioner, but more like John Kerry, Pompeo incredibly writes this on the Merida Initiative:
[AMLO’s] judicial reform proposal would also undercut key U.S. efforts in Mexico. Since 2008, when funds began to flow to the Merida Initiative, a first-of-its-kind bilateral security program to combat drug trafficking and organized crime, the U.S. has invested billions to build an independent and competent judicial branch in Mexico.
Pompeo must be aware that the Merida Initiative, the heart of the Bush and Obama administration’s Mexico policy, ended in abject failure. The American effort under Merida to remake all of Mexico’s corrupt judicial system was fundamentally unrealistic from the start, on the order of trying to build from nothing a national army in Afghanistan. Moreover, AMLO denounced and ended cooperation under the program years ago.
Yet Pompeo writes, “AMLO’s plan to have judges elected would toss away almost two decades of progress with the stroke of a pen.” Progress? Americans should not deceive ourselves. Not only did Merida fail; Mexico’s security situation worsened with bloody cartel wars as U.S. assistance programs stumbled along ineffectually for years.
Merida was, in fact, a mini-Afghanistan in U.S. bilateral cooperation in Latin America, as measured by wasted resources and the resulting security position of both countries. Today, significant U.S. =Mexican joint operations do not exist, beyond AMLO trying to help the Biden administration camouflage the movement of illegal migrants.
I recall my own personal frustration, working as a U.S. diplomat in Mexico on Merida projects and trying to cooperate with local court and police officials, whom we knew were under immense organized crime pressure. We were building on sand. Our Mexican partners were simply trying to survive; their families were vulnerable, while they all tried to live and work in geographic territory thoroughly controlled by the local criminal cartel. All this was just a handful of miles from the Rio Grande.
The lesson of Merida is how difficult this kind of security and development assistance inside Mexico actually is. Even Pompeo writes that an amazing one third of Mexican territory is under cartel control. Washington’s regular habit of just dumping vast financial resources on the problem is a successful strategy neither in Mexico nor Ukraine.
Washington policymakers who expect that more U.S. foreign assistance better deployed in Mexico will move the needle are blind to the evidence. There may be moments when nimble and limited U.S. engagement inside Mexico can be constructive—e.g., sharing intelligence, training technicians, and taking in extradited criminals—but large security projects and strategies must be Mexican. Leveraging the border will concentrate Mexican thinking.
The same realpolitik skepticism should pertain to notions that robust bilateral trade will both improve Mexican living standards and force good governance onto the country’s corrupt institutions. Arguably, NAFTA might have contributed to the former, but it failed miserably on the latter.
The next president’s way forward with Mexico will likely be met by calls to reprise past questionable policies, but foreign assistance and bilateral trade will not bring about the security cooperation the U.S. desperately needs from Mexico.
Pompeo, a genuine patriot who served his country in uniform and at Foggy Bottom, is grappling with this. One hopes he will advocate closing the border again when that moment comes.
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