By Isabel Studer
No region experiences the uncertainty surrounding the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) as directly as Mexico’s northern border. Here, integration with the United States is not an abstract matter of trade policy. It means jobs, manufacturing, automotive plants and supply chains crossing the border every day. That is why the conversation deserves to start here.
“USMCA survives.” That may be true. But that is precisely what we should be discussing.
A trade agreement is not valuable simply because it exists. Its real value lies in the certainty it provides for investments made with a 10- or 15-year horizon. That predictability (not geographic proximity or low tariffs) is the real engine behind nearshoring. What takes effect on July 1 transforms a 16-year horizon into a review process that reopens every 12 months for a decade. Nothing is being broken outright. Instead, something far harder to rebuild is being eroded: the confidence of those deciding where to invest for a new business. And that cost will not be shared equally. In an asymmetric negotiation, the weaker party bears more of it, and Mexico will enter each review from a defensive position.
That is why I am skeptical of the “opportunity, not threat” framing that is beginning to circulate. It sounds strategic, but it aligns too conveniently with the political message that needs to be projected. Someone deciding where to invest billions does not need reassurance; they need an honest assessment of the actual risk.
We should look north… farther north. Faced with the same pressure from Washington, Mark Carney did not ask how Canada could survive its dependence on the United States. He asked how it could reduce that dependence. His government set out to double Canada’s non-U.S. exports over the next decade and strengthen its domestic market under the idea of “one Canadian economy.” Then came the most symbolic step of all: moving closer to China. I do not see this simply as a technical trade decision. I see it as a declaration of independence from Trump, a message that Washington does not, by itself, determine the limits of a country’s room to maneuver.
That is the uncomfortable truth we need to name. The controversy over China is ultimately about the role Mexico accepted under NAFTA: that of a platform opening its market and territory to exports bound for the United States. The arrangement had a powerful logic. The assumption was that economies of scale, particularly in the automotive industry, could only be achieved by accessing the enormous U.S. market through exports. Everything else was secondary to that gateway.
But if the United States is no longer committed to USMCA over the long term, that logic weakens. And that brings Carney’s question back to us: why continue directing all new industrial investment toward a single gateway whose owner threatens to close it every year?
This is where the energy transition stops being merely an environmental agenda and becomes the industrial opportunity of the decade. We should be precise, without illusions. Mexico’s domestic market is probably not large enough to absorb four times the number of vehicles we currently export. No one is suggesting replacing the U.S. market overnight. But Mexico’s domestic market can attract enough investment to produce electric vehicles, batteries, and clean technologies for domestic consumers as well as other export markets across Latin America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The scale no longer has to depend on a single gateway.
Strengthening the domestic market also offers a dividend that matters in a country as unequal as Mexico: by definition, it is more inclusive than an export enclave. It directly addresses inequality and energy poverty instead of concentrating the benefits in a handful of industrial corridors.
None of this can simply be decreed from the top. Diversifying an economy requires businesses, government and civil society to move in the same direction, with anticipatory rather than reactive leadership. The border, which built its prosperity by reading the future of manufacturing before almost anyone else, is precisely the region that can learn to read it first again.
This is not about breaking-up with the United States. It will remain Mexico’s main partner for a long time. This is about no longer being a single-customer economy, and about having the boldness to decide that for ourselves.
Will we spend the next decade negotiating the terms of our dependence, or will we use this moment to begin reducing it?
The author is president of Sostenibilidad Global A.C. She holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree from El Colegio de México. She has led initiatives at the University of California, The Nature Conservancy, Amexcid, Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Semarnat and the Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Global Institute for Sustainability.
