How History Shapes Global Power: Mexico, Trade, and the Future of North America

Learning history is so critical to understanding how the world works, how it operates. How important do you think it is? On this episode of Executive Edge, Simon is joined by Jose Juan Lopez Portillo, a former diplomat and international relations expert. He shares why history and context matter in leadership, geopolitics, and decision-making today.

I think history teaches you some very useful analytic skills. I remember a professor at Oxford used to say that the only kind of information we really have is the past. The present is just an instant between the past and the future, and the future is just the past that hasn't happened yet. And so if you want to know about the future, what you really need are the tools with which you analyze the past.

And that gives you the methodology of thought that can allow you to try to guess the future. We really don't have much more than that. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another recording of Executive Edge.

Here with your second host, Simon Rycroft. Happy New Year. This recording is happening in 2026 and will be released in 2026 as well. So Happy New Year to everyone.

Excited to have with me prominent researcher and diplomat and also a close friend that I've known for probably three decades, which ages us quite a bit, Jose Juan Lopez Portillo. Thank you for coming on, Jose. How are you? Very well.

Happy New Year to you and to all your listeners. It's great to be on your show and great to chat as well for a bit. It's been a while. Yeah, yeah, it absolutely has.

Jose Juan Lopez Portillo is an expert in international relations. He's an advisor, professor and a former diplomat. Jose led political affairs for the Mexican embassy, both actually more recently in Washington DC here in the US, but also in Norway and Europe. Jose Juan has a PhD in history from Queen Mary University in London, but also a bachelor's, first-class honours degree, I'll add, in ancient and modern history from the University of Oxford.

It's a pleasure to have him on, and I think quite an interesting time in international relations. I think everyone would agree, irrelevant of your political intent and biases and backgrounds, etc. but fascinating to hear from someone who's been behind the scenes. So we'll jump in.

Jose, your background specifically really started in research and with a heavy, heavy focus on modern as well as ancient history, which I think is fascinating. I don't think schools do enough of it. I think I spent a good few decades of my life not learning as much as I could have done. But learning history is so critical to understanding how the world works how it operates why certain countries work in the way that they do their perception on the international stage one question would be interesting is why why did you decide to go that route in your studies how important do you think it is to learning about history to understanding our countries and that you know political leaders operate today does that give you a good basis yeah well yeah thank you i am.

I always enjoyed history, and maybe it had to do with the fact that my father was also a diplomat. So I spent, for example, six years of my childhood in Rome, and there you're kind of surrounded by layers and layers of history. But also having to move and go to different countries makes you ask yourself, you know, why is this place like this? Why are these buildings as they are and what were they used for and so on?

So I always had that attraction. And when it came to choosing my undergraduate degree, it felt very natural to try to study history and to go deeper into that. And also, maybe growing up away from my native country, which is Mexico. Gave me an interest of learning about Mexico and its history.

And so all this created an appetite for it. And yeah, it's been interesting in my case to see how I have been able to apply a lot of the lessons I learned, not just from history, but from studying history to other careers that I've taken. How, in fact, it's allowed me to engage well with those careers. So firstly, I think history teaches you some very useful analytic skills.

You learn to absorb and analyze information. You learn to write clearly. You learn as well by deduction and by a kind of comparison between similar situations by analogy. And all these skills come in useful for all sorts of different areas of your life.

The other very basic point is I remember a professor at Oxford used to say that actually the only kind of information we really have is the past, you know, assuming the past started. A second ago is anything you really know because the the the the present is just an instant you know it's a transition really between the past and the future and the future is just the past that hasn't happened yet and so if you want to know about the future what you really need are the tools with which you analyze the past and that gives you the methodology of thought that It can allow you to try to guess the future.

We really don't have much more than that. I think at one point there was lots of faith that the processes that we call history could be turned into a kind of science that would make the future easier to predict. So the social sciences engaged a lot in that. And they've certainly added a tremendous amount to how we understand the world, how we understand the past.

But I don't think even the most sanguine social scientists or economists or many other of these more scientific approaches to human processes could feel comfortable predicting the future with their models. And then the other big, I suppose, point about history, and this is a very well-known quotation, but it comes from Mark Twain, who said that although history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. I think what he meant by that was that human nature being what it is, there are certain situations that at some level bear some resemblance.

And human nature being what it is, the humans who find themselves in that situation react in similar ways, in analogous ways before certain problems. And in my time in D.C., for example, it became very useful for me when I was trying to understand how the new Trump administration was behaving and the mechanisms behind some of the decision making to have studied how royal courts in Europe and vice regal courts in the new world operated.

It's a system of access. It's a system of preference where the personal and the public somehow intertwine and where the public interest and the personal interests somehow also get mixed up together a bit and produce certain decisions that otherwise seem very difficult to understand if you're just taking a more abstract approach to these things. That's fascinating. I mean, both the psychoanalytic approach to how to review history and just historical context for kind of predicting the future.

I mean, the nuggets you just gave us in that. The quote from Mark Twain, I think, is one that I've heard before, but not recently and not put into that and laid out in the way that you did. But then also the insight into how you leveraged that in DC and the current administration, I think, that's fascinating. I mean, it's so overlooked, though, with everything you just said.

I mean, history is deemed to just be something that you study to pass exams when you're in your teens. If I think about the way that the executives prepare for major commercial negotiations, let's put it into the world context, a lot of the times they're, they're missing that preparation element that comes from the research that's needed to give you the leverage and the understanding of who you're negotiating with and you need to persuade who are the players. But understanding not just those individuals' backgrounds with their needs, their wants, why they're at the table in the first place, but also the cultural ecosystem that's brought them to that point as well, right?

Which is the history of the company, right? Perhaps even the history of, you know, of them as individuals. Like where did they grow up? What cultures have influenced who they are?

What are the pressures that they're currently operating under? And then how does that go to perhaps just giving you an insight into how to communicate with them? Something as basic as that, right? That in itself, I think, is important, without a doubt.

I think since I've moved to the U.S. and it's been only a couple of decades now, I'm fascinated by how little people generally understand around just the history of this country in itself. They're taught certain things.

But just like back in the UK or in Europe or even in Asia, what you're taught in schools is tailored to the history that those countries want you to learn. And living as I do now in Texas, I know so much more than I ever did about the history of the U.S. But also specifically regionally about Mexico and Texas.

And that's opened my eyes to the cultural landscape that just exists in the city in which I live. That has helped me then determine how important it is to learn about people's backgrounds and countries' backgrounds in order to do business at an international scale, which I think a lot of the times is overlooked. Looked, give us a snippet of something that you think is interesting about Mexican history then based on kind of what I've just said of things like, look, something that you could share that you think is interesting and perhaps that people just don't know about the country at all.

Sure. Yeah. Well, I mean, Mexican history is very ancient and very rich. And I think one important clue about how Mexicans interact with their history, their sense of the deep history of Mexico, is if you go to Mexico City to the Anthropology Museum.

That's probably the largest and the most important museum in Mexico. And it's worth visiting not just for the artifacts that you'll find there and the history that they tell, but also because of the museum itself. In a sense, it's a museum of national history. But it's also a museum that tells the visitors that modern Mexico can trace its lineage back to the first populations that settled in the many highland and lowland valleys and semi-arid zones or wet tropical jungles of Mexico.

So they really view, we really view our history as going all the way back to the first human settlement. And you could say, well, you know, any country could do that. But Mexico has a real claim to an authentic history dating back to that time because it's one of the few regions of the world where agriculture was invented, as they say, ab initio, from nothing, from the beginning. So it wasn't, you know, groups that somewhere else had invented agriculture and then brought it through trade or other contacts into Mexico.

It was actually just generations and generations of people experimenting with seeds and developing a completely new and original system of agriculture. And so Mexico was kind of really one of the pioneers of the agricultural revolution. And it's why so many products that today we take for granted all over the world had their origin in this Mesoamerican region. The most successful problem is maize or corn, which was then spread around the world after the Spaniards arrived.

But chocolate, vanilla, chilies, certain pumpkins, these all originated in Mexico and weren't really known very far outside of the areas of cultural influence. Turkeys we just had Christmas turkeys were originally domesticated in Mexico, yeah in fact there probably weren't any turkeys in the original Thanksgiving dinner, Because Turkey's made it to the northeast of the U.S. After traveling to Europe and then being taken by European settlers back up there.

So because of this agricultural revolution, which happened also, by the way, because Mexico's one of the top five mega-diverse countries in the world. There's a story. I'm not sure it's completely validated, but even if it's not true, it has a ring of truth to it, that when Cortez, the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, went back to Spain and they asked him, what does this new land look like? He scrunched up a piece of paper and dropped it on the table and he said, it looks like this.

And what he meant is that it's very rugged and mountains. and Mexico City is at 2,000 meters of altitude and so it extends from these highland. Basins and plateaus all the way down to the much hotter lowlands. So it's a mega diverse country.

It has almost every possible ecosystem. And that allowed this development of agriculture and ecological exchanges, as they call them, between one region and another. So you could trade in very, very diverse kinds of products. And this is what gave it this wealth of agricultural production, Which it retains to this day, by the way, in the winter months, something like 80% of all fruits and vegetables that the U.

S. Consumes is imported from Mexico. So that's a remarkable statistic. And anyway, it meant that for most of human history, the great center of population density, wealth, power, and stuff was in what's now the center and south of Mexico.

Mexico City was the largest city in the Americas until well into the first half of the 19th century. And so one thing that I think is often overlooked is how meaningful this is still to the Mexican psyche. This was a real center of human civilization and has been for a very, very long time. And in a sense that the switch or the relative preponderance of the areas further north in the Americas seems fairly recent in the very long run of history.

And I think this feeds a lot of Mexican national pride. It's a real source of identity. That background history in agriculture influenced changing cuisine landscape, specifically within Mexico itself, but then also had an influence on the changing landscape. Cuisine in neighboring countries, specifically in the US.

Food that is more biodiverse and available throughout the year is going to be promoted in restaurants and in grocery stores. It becomes more commonplace. The types of meals that people, just the dominance of, especially in the South and the US, the dominance of rich, Mexican food is, you know, there's got to be a logic to that, right? It wasn't just who own parts of the land here.

It's also, you know, just the priorities around international trade and food manufacturing companies, the strategies. Yeah, I mean, really, it's spread all over the world. And the other, I suppose, aspect of how Mexico contributed to the globalization, really, was that after the Spaniards arrived in the 16th century, they were very interested in precious metals. Especially silver and gold.

And by the second half of the 16th century, they'd found a lot of the largest silver deposits anywhere around the world. And as they developed those mining interests, and by the way, a lot of these Spaniards very quickly became very identified with the land of Mexico. So the cultural strength of Mesoamerica was such that it really involved the Spanish settlers with the destiny of the land as well. But it helped that they had these mineral riches, and it made the elite of New Spain, as Mexico was known back then, into not just extremely rich, But it turned them also into pioneers of trade with Asia through the first Pacific trade route.

So they would buy so much from China and Japan at one point that the crown had to limit China. The amount that they were able to import because otherwise so much of the silver was flowing to China and Japan, but enough was flowing to Europe as well that it gave momentum to a lot of the cultural, scientific, and so on developments that were going on there. It made Europe into a much richer place and I suppose is part of what some people might call the rise of the West. It plays a large part in that narrative.

And for a long time, silver was the kind of reserve currency of the world. A lot of it was produced in Mexico. So when Mexico gained its independence, a lot of people were very optimistic about its future. I think the fact that it didn't flourish to the same degree as the U.

S. In the 19th century and was very late to the Industrial Revolution and so on has more to do with contingent issues than to anything that was intrinsic to that territory. So anyway, sorry. No, not at all.

I knew that the insights we get from the conversation with you would be broad and deep. So no, I just don't apologize. Keep going. All of those things are super interesting.

What is then your prediction for the future? Because I do see, you know, there has been seismic shifts in trade, you know, obviously political landscape sometimes derails or delays future potential innovation. Sometimes it can grease the wheels and accelerate it. And hopefully that ends up being the case over the next two, three years.

But do you see Mexico changing and accelerating and there being somewhat of a growth but maybe the next decade or so. There are certain geopolitical reasons why that's certainly a very likely possibility. And I suppose the broad picture is that the kind of globalization that had been going on since the late 80s, which was a globalization that pushed towards ever freer trade, lower trade barriers, an international rules-based system, A kind of massive specialization of certain areas to the cost sometimes of a broader economic resilience and so on is coming to an end.

It's coming to an end through protectionist commercial policies, through industrial policy led by the state and organized through a logic of national self-interest or security rather than the idea that if you just liberalize as much as possible. The invisible hand of the market would sort everything out and improve efficiencies. And so in this much more intentional type of economy, the likely tendency is that the US will start disengaging from China and other parts of the world to try to make its own supply chains more resilient.

We'll try to repatriate as much as possible of those capacities to the U.S. And Mexico isn't just the neighbor of the U.S.

It's also a highly integrated economy with the U.S. The old notion that it was a zero-sum game where U.S.

Manufacturing was moving to Mexico to the cost of U.S. Manufacturing has stopped being the case for a long time. Mexico and the U.

S. Now build things together. And the backbone of that is the automotive industry where a car crosses the border several times before it's completed. So you make some parts in Mexico, some parts in the U.

S., some parts in Canada. And that's why NAFTA became the USMCA. There was a real logic behind that.

And I think that logic will hold true because if the U.S. Wants to compete effectively with China and other parts of the world, not just in terms of manufacture, but in terms of the efficiency of its economy. Then its greatest practical advantage remains in maintaining manufacturing.

Close economic ties with its North American neighbors, and Mexico in particular because it's a complementary economy. We don't compete anymore. So in this era where there are tariffs going up everywhere, there may be tariffs as there already are on Mexico and Canada, but I have a strong sense that they will be relatively lower than the tariffs that are put on other regions of the world. So in relative terms, Mexico will still be part of this North American integration story.

And as this decoupling with China and other places, or however you want to describe the process, takes place, then the nearshoring opportunities for Mexico become very important, and the logic behind them becomes pretty irrefutable. Now, there's nothing inevitable about this, but there is an opportunity that both Mexico and the U.S. Can seize to really pump up the productivity and the efficiency of the North American economy.

And that will only strengthen the resilience of the supply chains in both countries. We're not far away from each other. We have all sorts of mechanisms and a lot of experience of working together, not just on economic issues, but on security issues, energy issues, any number of migration, any number of issues. So I think the logic for that is still very strong.

And that means that there's huge opportunities in it. In Mexico. This year will be important in that regard because there's a review of the USMCA where they're going to try to iron out whatever differences they might have. And hopefully it'll be approved and that will restore certainty to the business sector that relies on these international exchanges.

And that will just allow the relationship to flourish once again. Yeah, no, I totally agree. I am long the Mexico-US symbiotic relationship without a doubt. And I don't just think from a manufacturing standpoint, seeing the strategic changes that a lot of companies I work with have made or are considering making, it's not just on the industrial front, it's also on the innovation side.

I think people often overlook purely by focusing on either the agricultural wealth and history. Of Mexico and also the industrial side but the innovation and the tank that's coming out of. Regions and cities like Guadalajara, not just in Monterey, but the future of data center development. I mean, that's not all going to happen in the US.

It's going to need to happen in other regions that have access to that talent, not just cost-effectively, but also from access to engineering expertise and background experience. And our tech firms that I've worked with are in either investing and or considering to invest in the region for that real same collective end goal. And that is on the international scale allowing them to compete against China that has access to the money, the resources, the land, and the energy all within the same environment and political landscape is that the U.

S. Has to effectively do that with its closest ally and partner, which i think is is mexico so that's going to be exciting to watch what is what guidelines do you then have for executives that are either operating within mexico looking to expand or investigating the opportunity of of either investing or buying businesses down in mexico or or maybe moving part of their operations either whether you have them or whether you know with a supply chain change or a vendor base in the region?

What's your headline guideline for them in how to do that? Yeah, I think luckily there's a lot of expertise already and a lot of experience in. U.S.

-Mexico investment trade and so on. But if I could add something new to a lot of the stuff that's already out there, it would be this, that this process of deglobalization and this reassessment of what government is for isn't just happening in the U.S. or Europe.

It also happened and is happening in Mexico. And so it would be useful, I think, for companies that are thinking of investing in Mexico in understanding the nature of this political transformation in Mexico, what the aspirations of the government are, because that'll allow them to present their project in a way that fits better with those objectives. And that will, I mean, Mexico is already very welcoming to foreign investment, but this will make it an even easier process. The landing will be even softer and better.

Yeah. I think like in the US, one of the objectives of the governments in Mexico is to try to focus on those segments of society that have felt left out or marginalized by the previous period. So areas of the Mexico, like the center and south that didn't have as much investment is the north will be a focus of the government. If companies can help to train local workers, you know, to make sure they can upskill within the company, that would be extremely welcoming.

Any kind of project that encompasses that as part of its investment, I think will resonate very, very well with the authorities. Other issues as well, like a priority towards giving a more dignified form of employment to the people that they employ will also resonate with the government. And then I think even more doors and opportunities will open than they could have previously hoped for. And I think there the U.

S. Embassy in Mexico City is probably a very useful door to knock on. But certainly also the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C.

, or one of the local consulates who can also channel them to the right government agencies within Mexico, I think would be a useful door to knock on, just so that you're on their radar, that if the narrative is right, that they're very responsive to what they're trying to do. And yeah, I think that I could talk of many different things, But I think that would be a useful thing to bear in mind. And the other thing to bear in mind as well is that some of the needs of this new economy are the same in Mexico as they are in the US.

So energy, communications, water…. All these needs that in the U.S. Are growing massively, you mentioned data centers, to supply data centers, for example, or to supply industrial parks, all those demands will be there as well in Mexico.

So there could be opportunities that people aren't looking at. For example, in Texas, the energy sector, Mexico almost certainly has massive natural gas reserves still untapped, infrastructure for all of that. If we do project a kind of acceleration of growth in Mexico in the next few years, then all those will be relevant. Could be opportunities for investment, partnerships to go, and also close relationships with the government.

Just to emphasize that, again, it'll be very useful. Yeah. Avoiding a sense of resistance towards the government, which sometimes happens. I think it'll take a bit of local expertise or with the advice of the embassy, but working with the government to avoid resistance would be, as far as possible, would be the way to go, I think.

And it's interesting just in the way that I personally and also people that I work with, prepare for negotiations to just go back to that particular topic, all of those things that we do in understanding how to approach an individual or a group of individuals through a commercial negotiation is kind of the same steps or the same elements. But ultimately here, you just need to do it taking an understanding of the collective, which in essence a lot of the times is the history of a country, it's the culture, and then it's the political framework that exists today and their needs and wants in addition to the people you might be working with directly.

I'll ask this question, is there one book that you would recommend to say the US or Europe exec starting their journey of doing business in Mexico and wanted to quickly study the history of the country, its rich founding, and its maybe even current political landscape. Is there any good books that you've read or you might recommend that would give them a way to be best prepared? Well, I always really like the, I think it's called the Oxford History of Mexico. Okay.

Because it's not a single kind of text, but it's a series of chapters, each written by yeah here we go it's the Oxford history of Mexico each written by an expert oh I love it yeah edited by a guy called called William Beasley okay and Michael C. Meyer and so it goes chronologically and it says that the first chapter is about the original civilization and then it it leads on from that but uh but but each chapter is written by an expert on that period or subject. So you don't get like a continuous narrative, but you get some very good analysis about each subject.

Another interesting book from, this isn't really about Mexico, but the same. A professor who told me that all we really have is the past. He's a professor of history now at Notre Dame. His name is Felipe Fernandez Armesto, born in England but moved to the US about 20 years ago.

He wrote a book called Our America, a Hispanic history of the US. And basically, it just shifts the perspective of U.S. History to the Spanish-speaking peoples of what is now the U.

S. And I remember he asked potential professors or faculty at the university, you know, what's the. What part of the U.S.

territory has been settled by Europeans the longest? And it's not immediately obvious. And it's especially not obvious for people who only focus on the kind of Anglo-Saxon settlement. The answer is Puerto Rico, which is a U.

S. territory. And it's the most Caribbean islands to be settled by the Spaniel. So anyway, it's just a shift of perspective.

There's some real gems in there, like how Batman comes originally from the stories of El Zorro, who is a kind of Californian myth, things like that. But beyond these little details, just the broad history and outlook is fascinating. And it highlights, again, this Spanish-speaking population that still lives in the U.S.

, and that I think if they were a country, the Latin population of the U.S. Would be like the fourth economy in the world or something. So it's a market that you can't ignore, and that for obvious reasons also has a lot of affinity with Mexico and other Latin American markets as well.

So anyway, I always think that's a great reader. A good plug for my old mess with us. Well, I'll get those two books and links to those. I'll put them up in the comments, specifically on LinkedIn, maybe also on YouTube once we get this published.

But I myself will be ordering two copies as well. It'll be good new reads for the beginning of the year. Fantastic. Well, thank you again.

It's so good to see you. I knew that the conversation would be absolutely worth it and some great insight. And yeah, I hope to stay in contact and hopefully chat again pretty soon. So I appreciate your time.

Definitely. Thank you very much. This was really fun. If I think of more book recommendations, in fact, I just thought of a few more for more.

Well, we'll actually provide a top 10 list than in the comments and links to each. I'll send you an email. Okay, perfect. Thank you.

All right. Take care. Good to see you.