Continental drift: Trump roils North American relationships

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If North America was a business, its sign might read “Under New Management.”

Because soon the continent’s most consequential nations will all have new leaders.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum took office in October. President-elect Donald Trump’s second term begins on Jan. 20, and on Monday, at the same time Congress ratified his return, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he’s stepping down, triggering a Liberal Party process to temporarily replace him before a national election, as early as this spring, to succeed him.

The new management faces old issues, including legal trade of goods and services and illegal transit of people and drugs, as well as other bilateral and trilateral challenges — including the relationships between the new governments themselves.

Especially after Trump threatened across-the-board tariffs of 25% on Canadian and Mexican trade and hinted at unwinding the USMCA free-trade agreement when the pact comes up for renewal in 2026.

At a digressive news conference on Tuesday, Trump suggested renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, saying “it has a beautiful ring.” On Wednesday, Sheinbaum showed reporters a 1607 map that included the Gulf of Mexico and labeled North America as “Mexican America.” She rhetorically asked: “Why don’t we call it Mexican America? It sounds pretty, no?”

As for Canada, Trump trolled Trudeau by referring to him as “governor” instead of prime minister and has called for Canada to be America’s “51st state.” On Tuesday, Trump suggested using “economic force” to erase the “artificially drawn line” between what was considered a rock-solid U.S.-Canada alliance. But with that now in doubt, the president-elect’s provocations required a response from Canada’s Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, who wrote on X (Twitter) that Trump’s comments “show a complete lack of understanding of what makes Canada a strong country. Our economy is strong. Our people are strong. We will never back down in the face of threats.”

The disrespect to Trudeau came amid disappointment from his own party, let alone country, with Canadians calling for an end to the prime minister’s era, which once heralded an ascendance of Western liberal governance that was repeatedly defeated last year in European and American elections or governing coalitions.

Instead, in many cases, conservative populists top elections or polls, including Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservative Party, which is tipped to take over governance in Ottawa.

“They are so dominant in the polls that for them, the earlier the better in terms of having federal elections — they have the momentum,” said Daniel Béland, director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

Speaking from Montreal, Béland said that “it’s not advantageous for Canada to have a weak prime minister on his way out to deal with Mr. Trump,” who “was not necessarily on friendly terms with Justin Trudeau.”

Conservative candidates, Béland said, “will say ‘if we’re in power, we’ll be in a much better position with the new government to deal with the incoming Trump administration.’ “

But whether they’ll be in a better position to deal with the Sheinbaum administration is unclear: The Mexican president’s politics aligned more with Trudeau, and Ottawa may go its own way with Washington.

Sheinbaum, who jettisoned the idea of jetting down to Mar-a-Lago to court Trump like Trudeau unsuccessfully did, instead called the president-elect – and called for retaliatory tariffs if the U.S. imposes them on Mexico.

“When Trump says ‘jump,’ Sheinbaum wasn’t saying ‘how high?’ ” said University of Minnesota Distinguished McKnight Professor of Political Science David Samuels. A scholar of Latin American politics, Samuels said that “they’re taking a measured approach.” Sheinbaum “has to show her autonomy.”

And yet, the threat is met “certainly with some anxiety, because a great chunk of the Mexican economy depends on having smooth trade relations with the United States, and Mexico knows it doesn’t have the upper hand in this relationship.”

But Trump’s hand may not be as strong as he perceives, at least in relation to core campaign promises, said Samuels. “One of the Republican calling cards in this campaign was that the last four years saw considerable inflation, and this hurt the middle class.” And “so waving the threat of tariffs on Mexican imports is essentially saying, ‘well, Americans are going to have to be willing to endure even higher prices.’ ”

We “all love going to shop at Walmart and Sam’s Club and Target and purchasing things on Amazon,” said Samuels, adding: “And it’s trade that makes that happen.”

Trade makes a lot happen in Minnesota too. And so the state’s stakes are high, especially since Minnesota’s top two export markets, according to the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED), are Canada and Mexico. In 2023 (full 2024 data is not yet available), exports to Canada topped $7 billion (which was down 22%) and were more than $3.3 billion to Mexico (up 19%). Overall, Minnesota exported $25 billion to the world that year, which was an 8% decline from 2022.

Exports create jobs, which could be jeopardized by a continental trade war.

And it’s not just jobs, but geopolitics at play. Responding to a turbulent world is most effective when aligned with allies. North American discord may make it harder to rally cross-continental countries to respond to Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and beyond. And Trump coveting other countries’ assets, like Denmark’s governance of Greenland and Panama’s canal — let alone the nations themselves — undermines the Western consensus on thwarting Russia’s and China’s territorial ambitions.

Accordingly, Trump should rally, not alienate, allies — especially North American neighbors.

“The way the world has shifted, we need them more than ever,” said Thomas Hanson, diplomat-in-residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Trump’s comments on Canada, Hanson said, “weakens our soft power to some extent within the alliances that we are increasingly reliant on.”

“America First” is “a nice phrase,” Hanson added, but “we can’t go it alone at this point, the way the world is evolving.”

Instead, North America’s new management should evolve together, united, to best respond to this shifting world.