Luis Rubio
An old American saying goes that “it takes two to tango.” For many decades, Mexico and the United States learned to dance with each other, though, after a serious and promising start, their heart stopped being there. In the eighties, amid a severe economic crisis that threatened to the destroy the country, Mexico began a series of internal reforms and opted to get closer to the United States, a decision that implied a radical rupture in historical terms, to ensure the viability of the reformist project and the Mexican economy in the long term. The United States saw the moment as the great opportunity that it could offer Mexico for it to transform itself. The original agreement, NAFTA, followed this political rationale. However, the seeds of a complex future were sowed from the very beginning, as Mexico contemplated the free trade arrangement as the end of a process of internal reform, while the United States saw it as the beginning of a great transformation of its southern neighbor. Today, it is the United States that is experiencing a convulsion, leaving little doubt that, whatever the outcome, it will impact Mexico.
Trump won his second term with the majority of the popular vote and converted it into a license to alter the status quo in radical fashion. Assisted by his new great friend, the businessman Elon Musk, Trump has provoked not only major revisions in international relations, tariffs, and the agency for international development (USAID), but he has also devoted himself to restricting public expenditures already approved by the Congress, promoting the early retirement of vast segments of the bureaucracy, eliminating agencies and departments without warning, thus creating enormous confusion. There are many ways to read the ultimate objective, but the whole structure of the American government is experiencing spasms and contortions.
Interpretations of what is being attempted fluctuate from the extreme that Trump pretends to become an autocratic king, to those that suggests that the process led by Musk aims to discredit the government itself. Though these interpretations are not exclusive, they reflect the personalities of the central actors in this drama. The history of the U.S. started with the rejection of European religious imposition (from which much of the derision to a strong central government derives), to which one must add the libertarian current to which Musk belongs, who believes that a government must function the way a business works. On his part, Trump has a series of well-established ideas, among which the use of tariffs is preponderant as a negotiating instrument (a key trait of the American president, who sees the world as a series of transactions), as much as his sense of revenge against the “deep state” that, in his reading, is responsible for the steal of his electoral victory back in 2020.
Both Trump and Musk have a history that explains much of their vision and, especially of the viciousness with which they are acting. Trump got to the presidency with a deep sense of resentment due to his perception that his country has been the victim of its own actions, starting with the Marshall plan after the second world war, to the growth of China as a competitor of the United States, and including the countries that, like Mexico, have become important suppliers of inputs, all of which he sees as an afront to the average American worker. On his part, Musk grew up in the era of apartheid in South African and saw how that society deteriorated, which led him to become a maximalist in his demands for order. The combination of these two characters explains much of the noise that emanates from the north and that affects the rest of the world.
Seen from afar, especially from Mexico, which has recent experience with an aspirant autocrat (with the power to make it true), the big question is whether the United States has effective counterweights to contain the excesses in which Trump might incur. One way to assess this would be to look into the control that the party of the president has in its legislative chambers and many governorships, but it would be excessive to derive from this a certainty that these august bodies would bend to the desires of the president. In contrast with Mexico, American legislators have to respond to their voters, which limits the propensity to yield before the pressures of the president (which are not small). Furthermore, there is no uniformity of ideology, politics or practice among Republican members of Congress, as illustrated by the endless juggling that the Republican Speaker of the House must play to attempt to get his budget approved, even if only for a few months at a time. Checks and balances appear more effective than they might seem.
The other factors of counterweigh are the markets and, in the long run, the most transcendent, is the judges, several of whom have thwarted the president’s actions and issued restraining orders to the presidential duo. It remains to be seen how the Supreme Court aligns itself, given that its members have, both by structure and necessity, to respond to history and not to the president or whomever appointed them. The prospect is, inexorably, of a time of uncertainty and unpredictability, just when Mexico requires the opposite… In any case, the stakes are enormous for Americans, the world and, certainly, USMCA and Mexico in general.
@lrubiof