Will keeping a ‘cool head’ allow Mexico to avoid the worst of the tariffs?

Once again, Mexico’s president has adopted a wait-and-see strategy. When US President Donald Trump announced steep tariffs on all cars shipped to the United States – a significant escalation in a global trade war – Sheinbaum stuck to pragmatism and patience.

Once again, she’s adopted a wait-and-see strategy. When President Donald Trump announced steep tariffs on all cars shipped to the United States this week – a significant escalation in a global trade war – his Mexican counterpart Claudia Sheinbaum chose pragmatism and patience. Playing the long game is the same strategy President Sheinbaum has used since the beginning of the new American administration, one that has so far saved Mexico from steep tariffs. In 2024, Mexico exported to the United States automobiles and auto parts worth $182.3 billion, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Given those figures, the new auto tariffs announced could pose catastrophic consequences for the Mexican economy – but Sheinbaum chose to keep a cool head. “We’ll have to wait and see what President Trump says, and from there, we’ll have to decide, one way or another, what decisions we’d make. We’ve been through this three times; this would be the third,” Sheinbaum calmly said Wednesday during her daily morning media briefing. The day after Trump’s inauguration, Sheinbaum said it was “important to keep a cool head” when she was asked to react to the American president’s first executive orders. Those orders included renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America and declaring multiple Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations – an act that could pave the way to using American military force on Mexican soil. Sheinbaum used the same strategy last month, when Trump was about to announce tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the U.S., impacting her country, among others. Speaking to reporters at her daily morning briefing, she repeated what had already become her mantra for the Trump administration: “As I said before, [we have to keep a] cool head on this,” she said.