Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s first trip to Mexico produced a “wonderful meeting” with leftist President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, he said during a Saturday interview.
“Well, it was a wonderful meeting,” Pompeo told Televisa. “I came with congratulations from President Trump. They had spoken by phone and had a wonderful conversation, and so we wanted to begin to develop relationships.”
Lopez Obrador, known colloquially as AMLO, won the election in a landslide victory back on July 1, following months of sharply criticizing President Trump. His win brings a new team to power in the midst of negotiations over NAFTA, as well as controversy over the families separated at the southern border as part of Trump’s latest effort to crack down on illegal immigration from Central America.
“It wasn’t a day for long, detailed negotiations, but rather to begin to develop a set of understandings about how our two countries have the chance to do great things together, and that the two presidents have great respect for each other, and leadership always can drive good outcomes, and so I’m counting on that continuing in the weeks ahead,” Pompeo said.
That emphasis on how “the two presidents have great respect for each other” has been a theme of government exchanges since Lopez Obrador won. It’s a tonal shift from the campaign, when he offered himself as a strong adversary of Trump.
“Without being disrespectful, we’re going to put him in his place,” the incoming president said of Trump in January.
That doesn’t make Lopez Obrador’s victory a referendum on Trump, who is overwhelmingly unpopular in Mexico.
“Trump didn’t move the needle on how Mexicans voted, [but] he might certainly impact the appetite and bandwidth with which the new Mexican government . . . will devise policies toward their northern neighbor,” as the Brookings Institution’s Arturo Sarukhan wrote. “And while Mexico will certainly not go rogue on the United States, bilateral ties under Lopez Obrador might well pivot back to the very basic, meat-and-potatoes relationship of yore — formal and correct but lacking strategic depth.”
Pompeo hopes to avoid that outcome. “We have to find ways to continue to make success possible for both sides,” he said. “It’s not a zero-sum game between our two countries, and I’m confident that we can do that with this next administration in the same way we have with the current one. It’s – as I said before, it’s not the case that it’ll be perfect all the time. There will be places where we disagree. But I am confident that the value sets that our two nations hold are compatible and we can achieve things that benefit each of our two countries.”
