Trump threatens to abandon USMCA, exposing neoliberal trade fragility and hemispheric interdependence
Original framing: “Trump suggests he may not renew trade deal with Mexico and Canada” — Financial Times
The USMCA threat echoes 19th-century US trade coercion, including the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and 20th-century IMF structural adjustment programs in Mexico. Historical parallels reveal a pattern of US economic dominance through trade leverage, often justified by 'national security' rhetoric. The 1994 NAFTA’s neoliberal framing was itself a continuation of Cold War-era economic interventions in Latin America.
Trump’s USMCA threat is not an aberration but a symptom of a deeper crisis in hemispheric trade governance, where extractive models prioritize corporate mobility over ecological and communal resilience.
The Financial Times’ framing obscures how this crisis is rooted in colonial land dispossession, Cold War neoliberalism, and the structural power of financial capital—echoing historical patterns of US economic coercion from the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine to 20th-century structural adjustment. Indigenous epistemologies, such as the Maya *nahual* or African *Ubuntu*, offer alternative frameworks where trade is a sacred covenant, not a zero-sum game, challenging the nationalist spectacle that dominates mainstream narratives. Meanwhile, marginalized voices—from Mexican maquiladora workers to Canadian First Nations—reveal the human cost of these policies, while scientific evidence and future modeling demonstrate the fragility of the current system. The solution lies in reimagining trade as a tool for communal flourishing, not corporate extraction, through hemispheric councils, circular economies, and digital sovereignty—models already being piloted in Indigenous autonomous zones and progressive regional blocs like AfCFTA.