The Praise That Papers Over Capitulation
Nearly two years into her presidency, Claudia Sheinbaum enjoys something increasingly rare in democratic politics: broad, bipartisan admiration. Mexican polling firms, including Consulta Mitofsky and El Financiero, have tracked her approval ratings in ranges that most heads of government can only envy. Foreign observers, particularly those who feared a collision between Mexico City and a revanchist White House under Donald Trump's second term, have hailed her as a steady hand — the pragmatic leader who kept bilateral relations from cratering.
Jorge Castañeda does not share that consensus. The former Mexican Foreign Minister — a man who spent years inside the machinery of Mexico-US diplomacy before spending more years analyzing it with unflinching candor — has argued in Project Syndicate that this praise is not merely premature. It is, he contends, built on a fiction. Sheinbaum has not managed Trump. She has, on nearly every issue that mattered, given him what he wanted. The skill lies in making the surrender look like statecraft.
That is a serious charge from a serious source. It deserves a serious hearing.
What 'Sovereignty' Actually Means in Practice
The word "sovereignty" has done extraordinary work in Mexican political rhetoric since Sheinbaum took office. It is invoked at press conferences, embedded in official communiqués, and deployed whenever a reporter asks whether Mexico has capitulated to Washington's latest demand. The word lands with a satisfying thud. It sounds like resistance.
Read next Ukraine War Is Quietly Breaking India's StrategyExamine the policy record and the thud loses its resonance.
On immigration, Sheinbaum's government significantly expanded the deployment of Mexico's National Guard to both the northern border with the United States and the southern border with Guatemala. The operational effect was to transform Mexican territory into a buffer enforcement zone for US migration policy — a function that Washington had been demanding Mexico perform for years under the prior administration as well. The framing was Mexican; the strategic logic was American.
On cartel designation, Mexico resisted the most provocative formulations floated by Washington — formal terrorist labeling, unilateral US military operations on Mexican soil — but yielded substantially on intelligence-sharing arrangements and cooperative enforcement mechanisms that critics argued amounted to the same functional result without the diplomatic embarrassment. The form was preserved. The substance was transferred.
On trade, the periodic threat of tariffs served as a lever that Mexico repeatedly accommodated. Where a different government might have escalated — filing complaints under the USMCA review mechanisms, rallying regional partners, making the political cost of tariff aggression visible — Sheinbaum's team consistently sought private accommodation over public confrontation. The deals were quieter. The concessions were real.
Castañeda's core observation is not that any single one of these decisions was indefensible in isolation. It is that the cumulative pattern reveals a presidency that has systematically chosen deference and disguised it as dignity.
The Strategic Cost of Cynical Diplomacy
There is a case for pragmatism in foreign policy, and it is not a frivolous one. Mexico's geographic reality is unalterable. Roughly 80 percent of its exports flow north. Remittances from Mexicans working in the United States constitute a significant share of household income for millions of families. No Mexican president can afford a sustained trade war with Washington. The USMCA is not a negotiating chip; it is the structural foundation of the Mexican economy.
But pragmatism and capitulation are not synonyms. The difference lies in what a government extracts in exchange for what it yields.
The strategic cost of Sheinbaum's approach is not primarily economic. It is institutional. By consistently accommodating US demands without extracting reciprocal concessions — on labor mobility, on agricultural trade terms, on the treatment of Mexican nationals in US detention — her government has established a precedent. Mexico yields. Mexico reframes. Mexico calls it sovereignty.
The precedent matters because Trump will not be the last American president to press Mexico. The diplomatic muscles that go unexercised atrophy. A foreign ministry that learns to disguise accommodation as resistance eventually loses the institutional capacity to offer actual resistance when the moment genuinely demands it.
Appeasement by Another Name: Historical Parallels
History offers uncomfortable analogies for this kind of managed deference. European democracies in the late 1930s provide the most exhausted example, and the analogy is imprecise — Mexico faces no existential military threat from Washington, and the stakes are categorically different. But the structural logic is recognizable: a smaller power decides that the cost of confronting a larger, more volatile neighbor exceeds the cost of managing its demands, and frames the accommodation as a sophisticated exercise in statecraft.
Closer to Mexico's own history, the decades of PRI governance produced a foreign policy doctrine — the Estrada Doctrine, with its emphasis on non-intervention and formal sovereignty — that served, in practice, as cover for a diplomatic posture calibrated entirely around not provoking Washington. The doctrine was genuinely held in many quarters. It was also genuinely convenient for a government that had no appetite for the confrontations that real independence sometimes requires.
Sheinbaum is not a PRI president. She is a scientist-politician with genuine democratic legitimacy. That makes the return to managed deference under a sovereignty banner more striking, not less.
What Genuine Mexican Sovereignty Would Look Like
Sovereignty, if it means anything operationally, involves the capacity to say no to powerful neighbors on issues of genuine national interest and to absorb the costs of doing so. It means building coalitions — within the region, within the USMCA framework, within multilateral institutions — that raise the political price of coercion. It means treating the bilateral relationship not as a fragile object to be handled but as a negotiation between parties with mutual dependencies.
On immigration, genuine sovereignty would mean engaging the United States on the root causes of Central American migration with the same seriousness that Mexico brings to enforcing US-preferred border outcomes. It would mean conditioning cooperation on enforceable commitments about the treatment of Mexican and Central American migrants in US custody. It would mean making the border enforcement that Washington demands a transaction, not a gift.
On trade, it would mean making the USMCA review mechanisms something Mexico activates rather than avoids. The agreement provides dispute resolution tools. A country confident in its sovereignty uses them.
None of this requires theatrical confrontation. It requires a clearer-eyed accounting of what Mexico has to offer and what it should demand in return — and the willingness to make that accounting publicly, rather than burying it beneath the comforting language of dignified relations.
Conclusion: Naming the Strategy for What It Is
Sheinbaum's approval numbers reflect something real. She has kept Mexico stable, avoided the economic ruptures that a full-scale trade conflict with Washington would produce, and maintained a tone of calm professionalism in an era not known for either quality. Those are not nothing.
But Castañeda's challenge deserves to stand on its own terms. The question is not whether Sheinbaum has been competent. The question is whether competent management of an unequal relationship — dressed in the language of sovereignty while delivering the substance of compliance — constitutes the kind of leadership Mexico needs for the next decade of what promises to be an increasingly fraught bilateral dynamic.
Calling something sovereignty does not make it so. A strategy built on disguising concession as principle has a structural vulnerability: it works only as long as no one names it clearly. Castañeda has named it. The harder question is what Mexico's foreign policy establishment intends to do about the diagnosis.
The answer, so far, is to keep calling it sovereignty and hope the applause continues.
Source: Project Syndicate
