In the days following the US abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro on January 3, Donald Trump wasted little time in extending the threat to both Colombia and Mexico. Labeling President Gustavo Petro a “sick man,” Trump followed up by opining that an invasion of the country sounded “good to me.” As for Mexico, after trotting out his oft-repeated chestnut about organized crime running the country, he proceeded to state: “We will now start hitting land with regard to the cartels.”
Marco Rubio’s State Department quickly joined in on the act. After falling over himself to praise Mexico in a September 2025 visit, when he gushed that “it is the closest security cooperation we have ever had, maybe with any country but certainly in the history of US-Mexico relations,” the secretary of state was now quoted in a terse communiqué as discussing the need for “stronger cooperation” and “tangible results to protect our homeland and hemisphere.” It didn’t take a geopolitical genius to understand how we got from “the closest security cooperation in the history of US-Mexico relations” to “the need for tangible results” in three short months: the invasion of Venezuela had emboldened the administration, leading its foreign policy coterie to swagger around like a posse of punch-drunk cowboys.
Faced with a renewed round of blustering threats, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum returned to the strategy that served her in good stead over the previous year: pick up the phone and, bypassing Rubio, handle Trump one on one. A short call took place on January 12, the day after the State Department communiqué, followed by a longer conversation on January 29. With excruciating patience, Sheinbaum once again was forced to reject the US “offer” for military intervention while making the case for her security policy, which can boast a 40 percent reduction in homicides combined with a 50 percent drop in fentanyl crossing the border. And again, the strategy seemed to work. “Mexico has a wonderful and highly intelligent leader,” gushed a clearly charmed Trump on Truth Social immediately after the second call. “They should be very happy about that!”
Positive as all of this was in immediate terms, its effects proved to be short-lasting. Less than a week after the first call, Trump was taking to Truth Social to promote the paranoid conspiracy tropes peddled by Steve Bannon protégé Peter Schweizer to the effect that Mexico is attempting to weaponize immigration and its network of consulates to influence US domestic politics. And mere days after the second call, the White House was releasing a bombastically provocative message, drafted in its now standard high-school diction, to commemorate the Mexican-American War (which stripped Mexico of over half of its territory) as a “legendary victory” that “reasserted American sovereignty” while “boldly emerging as a continental superpower unlike anything the modern world had ever seen.”
But worse was yet to come.
The same day as the second Sheinbaum call, and in another sign of post-Venezuela belligerence, Trump signed an executive order recognizing Cuba to be an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security (the same wording employed by former president Barack Obama in his 2015 executive order against Venezuela that paved the way for sanctions two years later), an emergency used to justify additional tariffs against “imports of goods that are products of a foreign country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil” to the island.
While the order referred to “any country,” the target was clearly Mexico. As Venezuelan shipments to the island faltered in 2024–2025 under US pressure, Mexico stepped into the breach, boosting exports to upwards of seventeen thousand barrels a day, nearly half of Cuba’s total crude imports. This, however, is only the latest chapter in a long-standing policy of solidarity with the island dating back to the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution. In 1962, Mexico stood alone in opposing the expulsion of Cuba from the Organization of American States; two years later, it refused to go along with the organization’s call to break diplomatic ties, becoming practically the sole bridge to Havana in the region for over a decade. With its ups and downs, this policy has extended across administrations of varying ideological persuasions ever since, including, of course, the MORENA governments of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (or AMLO) and Claudia Sheinbaum. In 2022, AMLO made one of his few trips abroad to Cuba; in 2023, when Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel visited Mexico in turn, AMLO awarded him the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest distinction awarded to a foreign national. Repeatedly, AMLO called for the Cuban people to be declared patrimonio de la humanidad, or a collective part of world heritage, for the audacity to consider themselves free of imperial domination.
All of this is by way of saying, then, that Cuba is not only important to Mexico for Cuba’s sake: it is fundamental to Mexico’s own conception of sovereignty and autonomy as the one area where it has consistently, and often bravely, defied the directives of the United States. It also explains why the current dilemma, with all its historical, political, and diplomatic resonances, is such a tough one for President Sheinbaum to face.
Throughout 2025, Sheinbaum’s approach of the cabeza fría, or cool head, was perfectly calibrated to stymie a volatile, reactive Trump: by remaining calm and unruffled, the presidenta succeeded in kicking the original tariff threat down the road long enough for the effects of the tariffs to begin to be felt by the US public. Faced with increasing public opposition to the policy, Trump quietly reduced or walked back the measures on a number of countries; with Mexico, he dropped the issue altogether.
Until now, albeit in a different context: as of this writing, Sheinbaum has opted for a variant of the postponement strategy, suspending oil shipments while sending an initial eight hundred tons of non-oil aid, including food and hygienic products. The objective, again, is to buy time in an attempt to negotiate around the executive order and thus be able to resume oil shipments without taking the economic hit the tariffs would entail. And to advance, as well, in the Plan México, Sheinbaum’s keystone national development and import-substitution initiative designed to reduce dependency on the United States and thus enhance Mexico’s bargaining position. Just this past week, to international acclaim, she cut the ribbon on the Insurgente train linking the cities of Mexico City and Toluca. Rapid progress is also being made on her pledges to deliver 1.8 million units of public housing and universalize the health care system by allowing all citizens to access any public health point of service, regardless of prior enrollment. In this context, one understands the allure of wanting to postpone, to fend off, to prevent the empire from sabotaging any attempts at sovereign development, as it has done so often in Latin American history, requiring countries to start over and over again in an endless continental Groundhog Day. As AMLO famously said, and many in MORENA fervently believe, “the best foreign policy is domestic policy.”
But Venezuela has changed everything. That, combined with Marco Rubio’s eternal obsession with regime change in Cuba, makes any accommodation on the oil issue to appear increasingly unlikely, the product of a near miraculous feat of diplomatic jujitsu. In short, and however much cabeza fría exists, Mexico is nearing a point where it will need to show its hand. And, contrary to the hand-wringing of a certain sector of its Foreign Affairs Ministry, Mexico does have cards to play. Despite Trumpian promises to bring manufacturing home, the United States lost 68,000 manufacturing jobs in 2025, part of an eight-month slide that kicked in once the tariff extortion began; job growth as a whole came in at 181,000, well below the initial estimate of 584,000. Meanwhile, despite the on-again, off-again saber-rattling, Mexico closed the year at record levels of foreign direct investment and in its trade surplus with the United States, demonstrating a resilience that outpaced all the noise. A large part of any tariffs on Mexico, moreover, would fall on US companies located there and exporting back home, often multiple times in the process of their production cycles, such as the Big Three automakers. If the will were there, the Sheinbaum administration could look the tariff threat in the eye and tell the United States to bring it on.
The problem, however, is that it does not end there. Nearly a quarter of the US navy remains parked in the Caribbean, both watching over Venezuela and now enforcing the “quarantine” on Cuba – the go-to term to avoid “blockade,” a clear act of war under international law. Any oil-bearing tanker from Mexico, then, would not only expose itself to being seized and boarded (or drone-bombed), but the ensuing diplomatic crisis could also give the Trump administration the opening it is seeking to bomb Mexico on land. Unfortunately, a multinational effort to break the blockade through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), or by means of an ad hoc grouping with allied governments such as Colombia and Brazil, does not appear to be anywhere on the horizon.
The alternative, however, is to let Cuba starve: the process of Gaza-ification brought into this hemisphere. If this were to succeed, and Mexico were to cede on an issue so symbolically important to its self-conception of sovereignty, the Trump administration would truly smell blood. And this, in turn, could affect everything from the current United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement treaty review to the treatment of Mexican migrants by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to US attempts to take hold of the nation’s strategic mineral stores. In the final analysis, defending self-determination anywhere in the region is defending its own. Mexico must not be made to stand alone. The international community and activists within the United States should take heed.
Great Job Kurt Hackbarth & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
