US Warns No USMCA Negotiations if Mexico Does Not Give In

ByMexico Solidarity

This article by Jim Cason and David Brooks originally appeared in the October 7, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

New York & Washington. The U.S. government is unwilling to begin negotiations to extend or renew the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) until Mexico meets the requirements Washington says are in the current agreement in the areas of energy, telecommunications, agriculture, and others, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told a forum at the New York Economic Club last Friday.

“There are sectors that should be complying with the USMCA but aren’t. It could be energy, telecommunications services, agriculture, all kinds of things,” he added, without offering many more specific details.

The U.S. Trade Representative explained that over the past few weeks, his team has been in negotiations with Mexican officials “on how they could best comply with the USMCA in anticipation of our assessment.”

He then added that “it doesn’t make much sense to talk about extending or updating the treaty when Mexico isn’t even complying with important parts of it.

“Our hope and expectation is that within the next month we will have a better sense of where Mexico stands on many of these issues, and we may be in a better position to conduct a formal assessment,” Greer explained to her audience of business leaders.

In his presentation, he also questioned the trilateral treaty itself. “The U.S.-Canada relationship is so different from the U.S.-Mexico relationship in so many ways… If you look at NAFTA and then the USMCA, it’s almost like, ‘Why are we bundling everything together?’” he asked.

“Many of our annual negotiations going forward will likely be almost bilateral. There will be certain issues where a trilateral solution could be helpful, but I think we’re going to spend a lot of time just one-on-one with each of these countries,” he noted.

The Trump administration opened a public consultation period on the USMCA renegotiation at the end of September. Business, labor, agricultural, telecommunications, and consumer groups have been meeting with various U.S. officials to request specific changes to the agreement.

If the government decides to extend the agreement, it would likely need to be approved by Congress, and legislators are also preparing their lists of what they want to see in the next treaty.

Negotiations are unlikely to be limited to the existing USMCA, retired Col. Craig Deare, an expert on hemispheric relations, explained in an interview with La Jornada.

“It won’t be limited to economic issues. We’ll talk about judicial reform, democratic electoral issues (…) as well as security. All of that was part of the package.”