Episode 18: Reflections From Mexico

Jorge Castañeda on America’s Neighborly Relations

Mexico ought to occupy a prominent place on the list of America’s foreign policy priorities, given its proximity. Yet political leaders in the United States historically devote resources and attention to further reaches of the globe, neglecting their Southern neighbor and downplaying the ways in which the two countries' histories and futures are intertwined. That might be changing with President Biden. This week, Jorge Castañeda, who was Mexico’s foreign minister, joins the Eurasia Group Foundation’s Mark Hannah to discuss U.S.-Mexico bilateral relations, and Castañeda's new book, America Through Foreign Eyes. Their discussion spans the intensifying migration crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how foreign publics view the US to broader questions about America’s role in the world.

Jorge Castañeda served as Mexico’s minister of foreign affairs under President Vincente Fox from 2000-2003. He has authored fourteen books, the most recent of which is America Through Foreign Eyes. He holds a Ph.D. in Economic History from the University of Paris (Panthéon-La Sorbonne), and is a visiting professor of politics and Latin America studies at New York University. You can follow Jorge on Twitter at @JorgeGCastaneda.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

America Through Foreign Eyes (Jorge Castañeda, 2020)

Archival audio:

Biden stresses importance of US-Mexico relationship in virtual call with President Obrador (Global News, March 1, 2021)
Mexican and American War Documentary (Time Warp Hunter Documentaries, December 25, 2019)
Secretary Blinken meets virtually with Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard. (U.S. Department of State, March 1, 2021)
WATCH: ‘It’s going to take time’ to build up immigration systems Trump dismantled, Biden says (PBS NewsHour, March 25, 2021)
Biden answers press questions in first news conference (Fox News, March 25, 2021)
U.S. agrees to share vaccines with Canada, Mexico (Reuters, March 19, 2021)
News Wrap: U.S. to send 4 million COVID vaccines to Mexico, Canada (PBS NewsHour, March 18th, 2021

Transcript:

March 30, 2021

JORGE CASTAÑEDA: Mexican democracy, Mexican economic stability, Mexican macroeconomic policy, and Mexican rule of law are valid issues on the U.S.-Mexican bilateral agenda. This is something he should be talking about with his colleague, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Earlier this month, President Biden met with Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to establish a distinctly new tone between the two neighbors.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: But how does Mexico look at America, and how can that understanding inform U.S. foreign policy? This was a central question we posed to today's guest.

CASTAÑEDA: I'm Jorge Castañeda. I'm from Mexico. I currently teach at New York University, and I was Foreign Minister of Mexico during the first half of President Vicente Fox's term at the turn of the century. I most recently published America Through Foreign Eyes at Oxford University Press, which is my own vision along with that of others over the last two hundred years, other foreigners’ views and ideas and impressions of the United States.

HANNAH: Let's just wait a second before we get started. What kind of birds are those that we're hearing in the background?

CASTAÑEDA: They’re little birds—a couple of robins here on the terrace. In Mexico City, it's spring—or the beginning of summer, really, but it's still spring. Rainy season hasn't begun. So, you have a lot of little birds. They’re cute.

HANNAH: That's such a hopeful sound here in the northeastern United States where I am.

So, Jorge, you were born in Mexico City, and your father was Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs. You yourself served in that same role many years later in the early 2000s. How did that experience—being Mexico's foreign secretary—shape your view of the United States?

CASTAÑEDA: The United States is much more important for us here than it is for other countries simply because of geography and history. It's not better. It's not worse. It's just more important. So, this is something I think about all the time. And I remember very well when I had my first meetings with Condi Rice or with Colin Powell, sometimes their people would get back to my people and say, “You know, we appreciate how frank and how clear and everything the foreign minister is with us. But you really do have to understand that he knows a hell of a lot more about U.S.-Mexican relations than we do.” And the reason that was true was not because I am more skillful at this than others, but simply because for any Mexican, the U.S. is the number one issue in the world, period. For practical purposes, it's the only foreign issue. Whereas for Americans—even those as talented and as sophisticated as Powell and Rice and many others I dealt with—Mexico is important, unquestionably, but it's not the only important issue on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.

HANNAH: That's kind of a very nice way of saying that America is egocentric, that America only cares about itself, and that's something you discuss at great length in your latest book, America Through Foreign Eyes. The book takes stock of various foreign accounts of U.S. political culture, and one common fascination is the culture of American exceptionalism. What do you think is the genesis or driver of that exceptionalism?

CASTAÑEDA: Well, I think, first of all, it's probably a necessary component of the American narrative. You don't create a country—I wouldn't say out of nothing. But you're basically inventing a country that didn't exist, and you have to have pretty powerful reasons to do it. Obviously, doing away with British oppression is one of them, but that's probably not good enough. So, you probably need to have this component of uniqueness, of exceptionalism. We're doing something exceptional here, something that has never been done. And since it's never been done, it has to be unique, and it has to be unique in all sorts of ways—in its relations with the rest of the world, in the way its economy works, in the way its political system works, in the way in which “all people are created equal,” quote unquote, et cetera. It has to be unique because if not, there will always be somebody asking, “Yeah, well, why bother to build something out of nothing, which is going to be like other places and like other countries?” And so, what I and many have called the “myth of American exceptionalism” is really indispensable for the American narrative or the American creed. The problem, of course, is that it doesn't always correspond to reality.

HANNAH: And one of the things I think the U.S. tells itself is that the things it's actually doing are not simply in its interest, but in the interest of humankind more broadly. But has that actually been the case? Has the United States actually been exceptional in that way, or do you think that's a myth as well?

CASTAÑEDA: Well, as I say, I think the exceptionalism part in foreign policy is also part of the narrative that starts way back in the early nineteenth century with the first expedition against the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean and in what we now call Libya—

HANNAH: —Which you helpfully point out was not started by the pirates, but the war was declared by the United States.

CASTAÑEDA: —By the United States. Or the Texan secession in 1836 and the war against Mexico—the invasion of Mexico in 1847.

Interlude featuring archival audio

CASTAÑEDA: In all of these cases, it's very difficult to find the difference between what the United States was doing and what the French and the Brits and, to a lesser degree, the Germans, the Belgians, and the Dutch were doing all over the world. It's not so different. Invading your neighbor and taking over, regardless of the reasons for this—and the reasons are very complex—there's not that much of a difference between the United States invading Mexico and annexing half the territory and France invading Algeria—I think in 1842, sometime around then—except the notion of empire in a strict sense—the strict definition of the word empire. But then you also look at some other cases that American authors or British authors have looked at closely, and even then you see there's also an imperialist—strictly imperial—aspect to it: the Philippines for many years, Puerto Rico—until today—Cuba practically from 1899 or 1905 with the Platt Amendment through the Cuban revolution in 1959, the number of invasions or occupations of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua during the first half of the twentieth century, and we could go on. Not referring to cases like Vietnam, but these are really occupations.

HANNAH: I think this is why you also write that American exceptionalism is for academics, public opinion formation, and grandstanding, not for the conducting of the business of government, and that's reflected in how we operate. For instance, when you were working with Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the conversations did not revolve around these lofty ideas of exceptionalism or concern for the greater good, but as you noted in your book, they were focused on America's self-interest.

CASTAÑEDA: I never heard from the folks I talked to or the folks my father talked to when he was foreign minister back in the late seventies and early eighties. You never heard that kind of argument: “Well, we Americans need to do this or want to do this or hope to do this because we're different. We’re exceptional. We’re this. We’re that.” No, it was basically: “Look, this is the world we live in. This is the situation we have.” None of this was couched in moralistic, idealistic, or purist terms. It was couched in straightforward language that we all could share and understand very clearly. We would agree or disagree. But there was no idealistic discussions about any of these things.

HANNAH: You also mention that this is fundamentally a home baked peculiarity. It is largely self-diluting, though, no doubt, immensely gratifying. What is the danger of this belief among the public or among foreign policy thinkers in American exceptionalism? How can this backfire on America and its pursuit of foreign policy or national security goals?

CASTAÑEDA: Well, it can backfire in the sense that perhaps practitioners of foreign policy do not subscribe to these tenets, at least not when they're practicing. When they go back to academia or elsewhere, perhaps they do, but when they're in office, they don't subscribe to these notions. Or they're not operational notions. But the general public can believe them if it's told often enough.

You know: “We're in Vietnam to save the world, to save the Vietnamese from all sorts of terrible things. And, yes, it's on the other side of the world, but it's terribly important because we have to fight for the freedom of the Vietnamese people.” I don't think Robert McNamara believed any of that stuff for a second, but there were a lot of people in the United States that did believe. Public opinion believed at least for the first years of the Vietnam War. And then, of course, you end up with the mess you got yourselves into and had to extricate yourselves from. And Iraq is a little bit the same. And as we speak, so is—a little bit—Afghanistan.

The United States could have just—the Bush Administration could have just gone into Afghanistan, found bin Laden if they could find him, get him—they couldn't, but at least make sure he wasn't there anymore—and get out. And whatever happens, let the chips fall where they may in Afghanistan. Well, it's now the longest war in American history. In October it's going to be a twenty-year-old war. It's beginning to sound like the thirty-year wars in the seventeenth century in Europe. Twenty years is a long time to be at war, even if it’s a small country like Afghanistan. So, the dangers are those—that people believe this stuff, and then they don't stop governments from doing silly things.

HANNAH: As you say in your book, everyday Americans and to an extent, even people in the foreign policy sphere, don't really care about foreign people's opinions of the U.S. What I want to know from you is: why should they?

CASTAÑEDA: Well, I think there are so many reasons, and a lot of them are in my book. But the one I would stress more than any other is because the United States over time has become far more sensitive or dependent or vulnerable—whatever term you prefer—to what happens outside the United States. The insularity of the United States, which allowed it to become the most successful, richest, most powerful nation in the world, with two oceans on each side and two friendly countries on the other two sides—that's over. The pandemic came from somewhere else, probably from China, but it doesn't matter. It certainly didn't originate in the United States, and it has devastated American society. The economic contraction didn't start in the United States. The United States has, in fact, fared better last year than most other rich countries, but it also had, at a certain point, twenty million unemployed. And this came from abroad also.

Trade is more important than ever for the Americans. Look at New York City. All of New York City lives off foreign tourists to a large extent, and there's no more Broadway. There's no more movies. Restaurants were shut down, and hotels were shut down. New York—I was there back in June of last year. It looked like a ghost town for all sorts of reasons, but one reason was that suddenly, foreign tourists weren't visiting one of the most visited cities in the world after Paris and Rome.

So, why should the United States care? Because what people think of the United States elsewhere in the world affects Americans directly—in their pocketbook, in their medical exams, in their welfare, in their safety, and in their security. If you have a bunch of people in Saudi Arabia, in the Middle East, and in Iran that think all sorts of—I think—crazy things about the United States, one day they act upon them. They actually go and do things that derive directly from what they think. And the U.S. is vulnerable to that. We saw it on 9/11.

HANNAH: So now the Biden Administration is in charge. What do you think they need to do in regard to Latin America? Should they put more of an emphasis on the region compared to previous administrations?

CASTAÑEDA: Well, I would separate Latin America. I would separate Mexico and Central America from South America. I think the Biden Administration is paying a great deal of attention to Mexico and Central America, perhaps more than any American administration, in its first hundred days in recent times, because of the immigration situation, because of Presidents Biden's wise decision, in my opinion, to undo what Trump did on asylum, on migration, on separating families, on building the wall, and et cetera.

Interlude featuring archival audio

CASTAÑEDA: Biden's people, from what I read in the press, are devoting a lot of time to Mexico and Central America, mainly for migration reasons.

HANNAH: If you had thirty minutes in the room with President Biden to advise him on that policy, what would your advice be? It seems like a kind of a thorny issue.

CASTAÑEDA: Well, it's two separate issues: Mexico on the one hand, Central America—the three main countries, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—on the other hand. The Central American or so-called Northern Triangle issue is a complex one, but one that can be addressed through a mixture of immigration and foreign policy instruments. In the medium- and long- term, doing what Biden has said he wants to do: pour money into these three small, poor countries. He's asked for four billion dollars, I think, over the next three or four years. I think that's a reasonable sum. It will make a huge difference. It won't make a difference tomorrow morning, but it will make a difference over the Biden term.

Secondly, find a way to negotiate with Mexico—how to have Mexico help. Not stop immigration from those countries. It's not for Mexico to do the United States’ dirty work, but for Mexico to cooperate with those countries and with the United States in trying to reach an agreement, a status quo that is acceptable to everybody regarding flow stock type of migration.

And then there's the issue of asylum where the United States has to think through what kind of grounds for asylum it wants to utilize to use in 2021. We’re not in 1950 anymore, when the United States approved the Geneva Convention on Refugees. The world has changed a great deal. It's been seventy-one years. For example, people fleeing climate change—is that an acceptable reason for requesting asylum? A hurricane destroyed my village and destroyed my community. Is that a valid reason or not? Intra-domestic violence and gangs and civil war, but which is not a declared civil war. It's not Syria. It's El Salvador, with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Is that a valid reason for requesting asylum? Those are the issues dividing people have to address as far as those three countries are concerned.

The big problem is Mexico, because a very high percentage—sixty percent over the months of November, December, January, and February—of the people being apprehended at the border by CBP and Border Patrol are Mexicans. They're not Central Americans. First of all it’s because Mexico is a much bigger country—127 million people. Secondly, it’s because Mexico is going through a terrible economic crisis. Our economy contracted eight-and-a-half percent last year. And thirdly, we have a government, quite honestly, that is driving Mexico into the ground. It is destroying the economy, destroying the democratic institutions we had begun to build in the 1990s, and destroying civil society organizations and autonomous agencies inside the state. And for President Biden, my concern is he has to understand something that’s very difficult for American presidents to understand, which is that Mexican democracy, Mexican economic stability, Mexican macroeconomic policy, and Mexican rule of law are valid issues on the U.S.-Mexican bilateral agenda. Now, he has more wherewithal to understand this than anyone I know in recent American history. But this is something he should be talking about with his colleague, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He should be telling him, “Hey, look, this stuff you're doing—you can't do it, because if you do these things, your economy tanks. And if your economy tanks, your people come north.”

HANNAH: Essentially what you're saying here—and I don't want to oversimplify—is that the United States, the Biden Administration specifically, needs to exert some diplomatic muscle, some diplomatic effort, to help Mexico shore up its institutions, because, as everybody knows, having a weak neighbor is not good for the neighborhood.

CASTAÑEDA: Absolutely. Let me give you an example. As we speak, the two governments are announcing a sort of Hondurans for AstraZeneca trade—somewhat cynical, but that's basically what it is. Mexico will stop the Central Americans, mainly the Hondurans, from entering the U.S. The U.S. will send Mexico two-and-a-half million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines that are not being used in the U.S. because the FDA has not yet approved them. It’s an understandable deal.

Interlude featuring archival audio

CATSAÑEDA: Now, why does Mexico need two-and-a-half million doses of AstraZeneca vaccines? We're supposed to have contracted tens of millions of doses from Pfizer, Sputnik, the Chinese, and AstraZeneca itself. As a matter of fact, we're supposed to be producing AstraZeneca in Mexico together with the Argentines. So, why do we need two-and-a-half million doses desperately enough that we're willing to beat up the Hondurans in order for Biden to give them to us? Well, because our government screwed it up. Because we don't have enough vaccines. A couple of days ago when the United States vaccinated more than four million people in a single day, Mexico vaccinated fifty thousand people. And we're only two-and-a-half times smaller than you in population terms. It's not that big of a difference. So, to give you an idea, you vaccinated one hundred times more people on Monday than we did. Why? Because we don't have the vaccines.

HANNAH: Well, Mr. Foreign Minister, thank you for being so generous with your time.

CASTAÑEDA: Thanks a lot.

HANNAH: I'm Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast of the Eurasia Group Foundation. Special thanks go out to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Thank you to our producer Caroline Gray, our editor Luke Taylor, our sound engineer Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistant Adam Pontius. If you enjoyed what you've heard, we'd appreciate you subscribing on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Do rate and review us, and if there's a topic you want us to cover, shoot us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. Catch you next time.

(END.)

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