In her public appearances and on social media, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has become a symbol of fearless resistance to the Trump administration’s bullying. She has delivered defiant speeches before huge crowds. When Trump trolled her nation with his “Gulf of America” stunt, she trolled right back: At a press conference, she displayed an antique map that labeled most of the present-day United States as “Mexican America.”

Her methods have appeared to gain a measure of respect. Almost alone among U.S. allies and partners, Mexico has been spared Donald Trump’s barrage of insults and threats. Canada is mocked almost daily. The administration expresses intentions to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal Zone. The administration has also doomed hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers by shutting off vital assistance. By contrast, Trump has lavished praise on Sheinbaum, calling her “tough” and “a wonderful woman.” Vice President J. D. Vance, who urged military action against Mexico during his service in the Senate, has gone quiet.

Other American allies must be impressed and envious. What’s Sheinbaum’s secret? How is she saving her country from the Trump-Vance flex?

The answer is straightforward, but not the one that the Palacio Nacional’s social-media operation is trying to project. Contrary to appearances, the Sheinbaum secret is appeasement. The reason Mexico’s president has not been called out for her Trump-complaisance is that the country’s political opposition and independent media are too crushed to name the policy for what it is. But the evidence is in.

David Frum: The ‘Gulf of America’ is an admission of defeat

President Trump has made six big demands of Mexico. Sheinbaum has granted them all. Let’s proceed, one by one:

First, Mexico has helped Trump seal the border. In February, apprehensions at the border dropped below 9,000 for the month, the lowest level since the 1960s. Meanwhile, the  Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration-skeptic group, estimates that U.S. border authorities are catching close to 95 percent of would-be crossers; if so, this means that successful crossings have trickled down to likely the lowest level since the Great Depression.

Mexican cooperation has been indispensable to slowing the flow. From Sheinbaum’s entry into office on October 1, 2024, to the end of that year, Mexico detained almost 500,000 migrants en route to the United States. Conditions in Mexican detention centers are notoriously harsh: They are densely crowded, with insufficient food and water and scant toilet facilities; ordinary migrants are mingled with violent gang members. Mexico’s national human-rights commission has difficulty gaining access to such sites. The high likelihood of ending a thousand-mile journey in a Mexican prison exerts a powerful deterrent effect on would-be immigrants. So do the intense military operations on the Mexico-Guatemala border.

During the Mexican presidential campaign of 2024, immigrants and their advocates expressed hope for a more permissive attitude from Sheinbaum. Instead, Sheinbaum has aligned Mexican policy with Trump’s edicts.

Sheinbaum has also acceded to Trump’s second wish, creating a new program to ease the return of Mexicans deported by the United States. Deportees will be met on arrival, provided with Mexican identity documents, and enrolled in Mexico’s health-care programs. Sheinbaum has indicated willingness to accept non-Mexican deportees and share responsibility for returning them to their home countries, in Central America or elsewhere.

Trump’s third wish—the militarization of drug interdiction—must have been even more difficult for Sheinbaum to grant. For a generation, opposition to a militarized approach to drugs has been a defining issue for the Mexican left, which regarded the country’s deadly drug war as a futile effort to protect Americans from their own country’s social ills. “Hugs, not bullets” was the slogan of Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

As president, however, Sheinbaum has yielded to American pressure. In February, she delivered 29 cartel figures from Mexican custody to U.S. authorities. Extradition was another historical pain point for the Mexican left, with its implied premise that American justice superseded Mexican sovereignty. Sheinbaum dramatically departed from past Mexican practice to surrender the wanted men. Beyond the symbolism of that surrender, bigger things are happening. Sheinbaum has granted permission for U.S. drone surveillance inside Mexico. CNN has reported that the U.S. is even flying Reapers, UAV systems that can carry a missile. For now, apparently, the Reapers fly unarmed, but the instruments for an American air war against cartels are already in place over Mexico.

Sheinbaum has also yielded to U.S. pressure on Trump’s fourth wish: Acquiescence to his tariffs. Unlike Canada, which has countered U.S. tariffs with a retaliatory regime of its own, Mexico has not yet responded in kind, even after Trump’s March 26 tariffs on Mexican auto exports. On Wednesday night, Mexico’s economy minister, Marcelo Ebrard, did hint in a social-media post that Mexican forbearance may at last be coming to an end—or it may not, because Mexican reaction to Trump tariffs has been impelled by considerations very different from Canada’s.

Although the U.S.-Canada-Mexico relationship is in theory a trilateral one, in practice it’s a pair of bilateral deals: U.S.-Canada and U.S.-Mexico. Canada and Mexico have each often sacrificed free-trade ideals to gain national advantage at the expense of the other U.S. trading partner. In the 2020 trade round, Canada tried to score off Mexico by writing a $16-an-hour minimum wage into the regulation of North American trade in automobiles and auto parts. The Canadian scheme backfired, however, when Mexican manufacturers opted out of the free-trade structure designed to keep wages low, correctly calculating that they could out-compete Canada even without tariff-free access to the U.S. marketplace: In 2020, Mexican auto exports to the United States overtook Canadian exports. Sheinbaum seems willing to stay neutral in the U.S.-Canada trade war in hope of collecting an additional share of the U.S. spoils.

On wish five, Sheinbaum is again complying. At the end of February, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed that Mexico had offered to match U.S. tariffs on Chinese exports. Canada, struggling to preserve the remnants of a global free-trade system, has so far opposed this carve-up of the world into trading blocs.

Finally, Mexico has also granted Trump’s sixth wish. Trump cares enormously about deference to his power. Canadian politicians have retorted to Trump’s demeaning comments, most famously in then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s televised March 4 words: “Now, it’s not in my habit to agree with The Wall Street Journal. But, Donald, they point out that even though you’re a very smart guy, this is a very dumb thing to do.” Trudeau called Trump by his first name and condemned his decision as “dumb.” Trump and his vice president use rhetoric like that all the time, but they intensely resent its being returned upon them.

Sheinbaum, by contrast, never mentions Trump by name when she replies to U.S. actions against Mexico, not even with her jibe about “America Mexicana.” She is careful not to contradict him in public, and her tight-mouthed restraint earned compliments from Trump.

David Frum: The failing state next door

Sheinbaum’s Trump wish fulfillment, especially on immigration, may be good neighborliness that ought to be expected from any Mexican government. But have her methods succeeded in defending Mexico from Trump’s protectionism and aggression? Can they be emulated by others? The answers are “not really,” and “no.”

Mexico has not been exempted from Trump’s economic warfare against former partners, culminating in yesterday’s tariff attack on imports of cars, trucks, and auto components. Mexico is accepting an intrusive and growing U.S. military presence in its airspace that may yet trigger open warfare between the United States and Mexican cartels on Mexican soil. Although Mexico has gained auto-manufacturing share at Canada’s expense since the first Trump administration, Mexican hopes of nearshoring industrial capacity at China’s expense have not come to pass and may now be dashed utterly by Trump’s latest moves to reduce or stop international trade. Trump wants any nearshoring to occur in the United States itself, to benefit his voters in red states.

Things could certainly be worse for Mexico than they are. López Obrador bequeathed a great many vulnerabilities to his successor. He left Mexico with its biggest budget deficit since the catastrophic debt crisis of the early 1980s, exposing the country to exactly the kind of international financial pressure he himself so constantly denounced in speeches. But “things could be worse” is a very limited sort of success. Sheinbaum’s strategy seems to be to succeed only in the sense that others are losing even more.

Even if Sheinbaum’s appeasement approach were Mexico’s best option, her model cannot be emulated by other states, especially democratic ones. A prerequisite for her strategy is that she leads a society that is consolidating into a one-party state, with a media subject to ever more stringent restrictions and government control.

A major reason for Trudeau’s snarky comments to Trump is that Canada is confronting the Trump tariffs at a time of intense political competition. In the federal election scheduled for April 28, Conservatives and Liberals are battling to position themselves as the tougher anti-Trump alternative. Sheinbaum can afford to submit to Trump’s coercion because she commands overwhelming majorities in Congress, doesn’t face the next round of congressional elections until 2027, and has put in place mechanisms to manipulate those elections when they finally come.

Sheinbaum’s political biography is that of a cadre of the left. But today, the most important political cleft is not the fading distinction between right and left, but the rising conflict between liberal and illiberal, democratic and autocratic. As Mexico follows America into illiberality, Mexico’s leadership finds itself surprisingly favored by Trump’s Washington, along with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and El Salvador. In contrast, the formerly close U.S. ally Canada is consigned to join Ukraine, Denmark, Panama, and the democracies of Europe and East Asia on the Trump enemies list.

Sheinbaum’s policy of Trump appeasement may well be the least-bad course open to Mexico. But it should be seen for what it is, not misunderstood as the brave resistance it most definitely is not.