AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Berman
Nothing says friendship like being asked to use the servants’ entrance. That is precisely what Mexico’s President Andres Maria Lopez Obrador, otherwise known as AMLO, requested of Joe Biden last week, when he asked that Air Force One land at a distant regional airport rather than Mexico City’s main hub. Lest there be any doubt about the nature of the power move, the Mexican President also sent Biden a list of topics to be discussed.
U.S.-Mexico relations have been on a downward trajectory since Biden entered office. The problem is not ideological but cultural. For the Biden team, politics is what it has been to Democrats since the 2016 election and Russiagate: a struggle between “democracy” and “authoritarianism”. The irony, not lost on AMLO, is that this is a fundamentally imperialist outlook, in which foreign leaders are expected to subordinate the interests of their own countries to proclaiming fealty to Democrats’ view of America’s domestic politics. AMLO has not only refused to play ball, but openly called out the absurdity of the attitude.
AMLO, who lost the 2006 Mexican election under circumstances he continues to view as dubious, delayed congratulating Biden on his victory until the results were certified. Instead, in the days after the election, he expressed criticism of the bias of the U.S. media. “In Mexico, we’re accustomed to how they used to censor us,” he said in a morning press conference on Nov. 9. “But in the case of the United States, what happened is something special.”
AMLO has remained an outspoken critic of social media censorship, and when Elon Musk conducted a poll on whether Donald Trump’s account should be restored, the Mexican President proudly announced his support, tweeting “I already voted for Trump to be able to use Twitter. The Statue of Liberty must not remain an empty symbol.”
The Biden administration and prominent Democrats were quick to treat this as a hostile act. Julian Castro, who served in Obama’s cabinet, declared, “This represents a true diplomatic failure from the president of Mexico.” Relations struggled from there, with the New York Times claiming that the Mexican president “already missed Donald Trump”.
The key problem in Mexican-American relations is not that Mexico is governed by someone who is anti-American, but rather that it is governed by someone who is determined not to be told what to do by the media, elites, or foreign governments. Precisely because Biden views Mexico as existing to do what the U.S. wants when it wants it, whether on the border, Latin America, or Russia-Ukraine, AMLO feels obligated to prove he will not. That is the key to understanding his behavior in July and highly tense meeting with Biden then, and also the otherwise incomprehensible nonsense which has attended planning for this trip.
The Mexican President is used to allowing the United States to drive the agenda for these meetings. That is why it is significant that Mexico has announced it will send a letter outlining the topics to be covered during a summit, then further informed the media when it had done so. This placed Biden in the position of either staying silent and allowing everyone to assume AMLO decided the agenda, or publicly challenging the contents of an unreleased letter, which could then be disclosed to make the United States look unreasonable.
Hence the issue of protocol. In his press conference, AMLO requested Biden not utilize Mexico City’s main airport for Air Force One, but instead a regional airport more than 30 miles away. AMLO’s statement carried no cover or excuses.
AMLO has also made clear what he wants from the United States, or at least Joe Biden. He wants Joe Biden to prove “friendship” by debasing himself, by accepting AMLO’s right to determine the agenda for the summit, and by agreeing to in effect enter and leave Mexico through the backdoor. It is remarkably similar to how the Saudi Crown Prince denied Joe Biden the royal audience offered to both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, seemingly in retaliation for similar mistreatment.
It is also a sign that AMLO doesn’t really need the summit as much as Biden does. If he did, he would not risk pushing Biden into walking out. Biden cannot deliver on migration, both for domestic political and legal reasons, and he has no interest in offering anything else. AMLO already has a trade deal. The only payment AMLO can receive from the visit is prestige, and he seems to have concluded he can maximize that either by playing tough with Biden or having Biden pull out.
Biden, on the other hand is trapped. Not physically, but by the myths Democrats have constructed. Democrats have imagined a moral arc of the universe in which “democracy” triumphed with the defeat of Donald Trump, in which identity politics drives policy, and in which support for their fervent anti-Russian sentiment and other foreign policy predispositions are non-negotiable. It is less important to Democrats that they do anything to improve the situation on the border than that they never concede Mexico and Mexicans might not actually share their views on illegal immigration.
If Democrats did admit this, having justified their unpopular positions on the basis of solidarity with “Mexicans” and denounced opponents of their views as racist, Democrats would have to question who precisely they are pursuing the policy for. Biden and his allies have created a situation in which they now have to pay in concrete terms for leaders like AMLO to mouth the words they want to hear about migration and Ukraine, and in the process they have given leaders like AMLO the power to insultingly demand to be paid for doing so.
An interesting element is exactly how irrelevant Justin Trudeau is to these proceedings. He is not important enough for Mexico to insult, nor relevant enough to mediate for Biden. Canada’s soft power always was greatest under Republican presidents, when a Canadian Prime Minister could act as a de facto liberal opposition leader on the international stage, as Jean Chretien did in opposing the Iraq War, and Trudeau himself did under Donald Trump. But it tends to be that when Democrats are in the White House, the most liberal Canadian leaders aspire to is a supporting role. His identification with the “anti-Trump” global current during the Trump years makes the idea that he could mediate between Biden and AMLO a laughable one.
The conclusion revealed by the summit is stunning. North American relations may have had points of tension while Donald Trump was president, but the United States remained the driving force. Donald Trump achieved a new trade deal with Mexico and Canada, and a border agreement with Mexico—productive developments.
Under Biden, North American relations are defined by U.S.-Mexican tensions and driven by the needs of both leaders for some “prestige” on the world stage. All parties involved have given up on the idea of accomplishing anything concrete of the sort Trump did on trade and the border.
Daniel Berman is a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He also writes as Daniel Roman.
