Mexico Doesn’t Play in the World Concert

Whoever serves as national security advisor in the White Hose becomes one of the most influential people on the international stage.

One most commonly sees him photographed with the most powerful leaders of the world, including his own boss, the president of the United States.

Created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 early in his administration, the position has been occupied by people with the stature of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

Given his proximity to the president of the United States, the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies, if the national security advisor of the White House reveals information, one should pay attention.

Even more so, if, as in the case of the book by John Bolton which recently came out, the White House resident resorts to the court to stop him from saying what he knows.

In the few days that it has been in the hands of reporters, the book, “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir,” has given rise to bombshell information, such as the story that President Donald Trump asked his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, to help his reelection by purchasing U.S. agricultural products.

But Bolton’s work is not only relevant for what appears in it, but also for what does not appear.

And if there is a big hole in its 15 chapters and 570 pages, it is Mexico, a country that is mentioned only 23 times in the book (which can be seen as a guide to the foreign policy priorities of the United States in the time of Trump).

The large majority of the few mentions of Mexico have to do with the frontier and the wall.

For example, Bolton writes, “In the middle of 2018, John Eisenberg, a White House lawyer, came to see me to find out if I was interested in trying to repair the collapse of the policy on immigration in general and the Mexican frontier in particular. *

“I wasn’t interested in getting into this arena without the decided participation of the White House legal counsel and the Justice Department. Don McGahn (then legal counsel) saw the immigration policy as a swamp that he decided to remain clear of. Now alerted, I kept an eye on the matter but followed McGahn’s example.”*

In the approximately 185,000 words in the book which cover what it took Bolton to live with Trump between April of 2018 and September of 2019 when he left the job, the only Mexican politician who appears is then foreign minister, Luis Videgaray Caso. Presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and Andrés Manuel López Obrador are not mentioned.

Instead, Vladimir Putin appears 251 times; Nicolás Maduro, 196; Emmanuel Macron, 144; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 95; Xi Jinping, 86; Angela Merkel, 56, and Justin Trudeau, 16. Even the presidents of Colombia and Brazil, Iván Duque Márquez and Jair Bolsonaro, are in the book.

Compared with 23 mentions of México, Iran appears on 755 occasions; China, 682; Russia, 532; North Korea, 426; Syria, 384; Venezuela, 361; South Korea, 197; Turkey, 135; Israel, 101; Germany, 99; Cuba 84; Colombia, 39 and Canada, 37.

Those are America’s priorities. Mexico isn’t one of them. We don’t play in the international concert. We have just joined, for the fifth time in history, the U.N. Security Council, but how will we know what our participation accomplishes in a body where one of the five permanent members, the United States, simply doesn’t consider us an important player?

*Editor’s note: These quotations, accurately translated, could not be verified by the content of the book, which was not freely available.