Given all the rhetorical arrows President Trump sent Mexico’s way during his 2016 presidential campaign, it must come as some surprise that the nation’s southern neighbor is the one now seeing eye-to-eye with him on issues of regional free trade.

Trump announced this week a “tentative” trade agreement with Mexico. Based on principles only, its details are still sketchy and subject to revision. But the most noteworthy fact about it pertains to the strategy with which this agreement has been created. Trump and the Mexican negotiators excluded Canada, an economy and Anglophone culture joined almost seamlessly to the U.S., from the talks that led up to this breakthrough.