2026: Goodbye to the T-MEC?

Overtaken by the new tariff policy of the United States, the North American trade agreement will enter a review phase, prior to the renegotiation agreed in 2018.

donald trump has publicly expressed its intention not to subscribe to it. Of the 31 trillion dollars generated by the exchange between the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, 95% correspond to the American Union.

The first version of the agreement – NAFTA – benefited American farmers, but allowed the expansion of the automotive industry in Mexico and Canada. Initially, the promise was that workers’ salaries would improve, but only qualified labor could access the international tabulators. The narrative that the world’s largest market would develop in the region was also not so accurate.

In 2018, American negotiators, led by Jamieson Greerobtained approval from Congress to include a periodic review clause to the USMCA, with the explicit intention of modifying it or even leaving it, if necessary.

For 25 years, the FTA persisted unchanged, with no driving factor to force political accountability for the agreement. And he lost political support, especially in the United States.

The USMCA modified the rules of origin to encourage more content from North America, particularly the United States, in the face of the Asian invasion. One of the drawbacks is that the most favored nation rate for automobiles in the United States is 2.5% – the so-called chicken tax – which in fact reduced the incentives to increase production in the region. The Trump administration imposed Section 232 on cars to offset that disadvantage.

Right now, on the road to reviewing the USMCA, the Americans are studying the adoption of non-automotive rules of origin.

“The TMEC is law,” said the president Claudia Sheinbaum. The secretaries of Economy, Marcelo Ebrardand Agriculture, Julio Berdeguehave had to spend many weeks in the American capital to meet the demands of their counterparts. Among this maelstrom – from which the chancellor has been excluded, Juan Ramon de la Fuente— there was one piece of information that anticipates the future: in all of 2025 there was not a single high-level trilateral meeting that was convened or in which the ambassador participated Jamieson Greer.

“There could be a couple of protocols attached to the agreement… or there could be a replacement,” Greer said in early December, at the Atlantic Council. “There are many things that could be done. Now, there will be certain areas where a trilateral discussion could make sense. Rules of origin is one of them. Do we align to some extent on foreign trade policies? That could be another. Critical minerals could be another area.”

The energy chapter of the USMCA will come to the fore. And that will lead Secretary Luz Elena González to open a first-level dialogue with Washington DC

SIDE EFFECTS

INTERFERENCE? In addition to its offensive against Ukraine, the Russian Federation is deliberately stoking anti-American sentiment in different regions of the world. Reports generated in Washington DC and taken up by different communicators on both sides of the Rio Grande identified Mexico as one of the scenes of an influence campaign sponsored by the Kremlin called Doppelgänger.

PERSPECTIVES. Morning Consult closed 2025 with a report on consumer confidence in the world. In terms of political risk, the American hemisphere is one of the areas with the greatest political risk, along with Europe. And volatility continues to be the dominant economic issue in most countries as we begin the year 2026. Mexico begins the year with 110.3 points in the consumer confidence index and a BB+ rating in the political risk rating, while Brazil registers 114.5 points and a BB rating.