Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
Mexico is Unique among the tyrannies friendly to the United States. Not only does it share a porous, 2000-mile border with the United States, but it is probably more interdependent with the United States on a host of issues — water resources, pollution, energy supplies, tourism, investment, trade, finances, migrant labor, debt, drugs, agriculture, to say nothing of politics and diplomacy — than any other country in the world. What happens in Mexico has profound implications for the United States and viceversa.
This paper was prepared for the Year Two Conference of the Foreign Policy Research Institute Project and will appear in Friendly Tyrants: A us Policy Conundrum (edited by Adam Garfinkle and Daniel Pipes, forthcoming from the Foreign Policy Research Institute). Dr. lêda Siqueira Wiarda commented on an earlier draft of the manuscript. The outline and subheadings of this paper are those provided by the editors of the larger project.
Mexico is a developing Third World country bordering an industrialized First World country. Moreover, there is a risk — albeit small at present — that Mexico may get sucked into the maelstrom of the Central American conflict. Hence Mexico is one of those critical locales, rather like the Caribbean Basin, the Middle East, and southern Africa, where the North-South vortex of conflict and the East-West one intersect.