George Condon: Why There Won't Be a 'Three Amigos' Summit This Time Around George E. Condon Jr. - NationalJournal
go to original February 17, 2014

When President Obama flies to Mexico on Wednesday to meet with his North American counterparts, he'll be reviving a continental leaders' meeting that George W. Bush envisioned as an annual event when he hosted the first one in 2005. That one went so well it was dubbed the "Three Amigos Summit." Then-Mexican President Vicente Fox praised Bush, saying he had "mastered the traditional male hug of Mexican culture, the abrazo."

But Obama is not really the hugging kind. And he, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper are not really acting much like amigos these days. So don't expect a lot of abrazos during Obama's time in Toluca, the capital of the state of Mexico, about 40 miles southwest of Mexico City. There are problems among the leaders of the continent's three countries. Former President George W. Bush with former Mexican President Vicente Fox, left, and former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin at a joint news conference at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, in 2005. (Rod Aydelotte/Waco Tribune Herald, Pool)

Washington is displeased that Peña Nieto blocked most of the American security cooperation after he took office a little more than a year ago and concerned at the continued high levels of violent crime and kidnappings in Mexico. Mexico City is displeased that Obama has failed to push through immigration reform in the United States. And Ottawa is displeased that Obama has taken five years to make up his mind on their proposed Keystone XL pipeline into the United States with still no decision in sight. Further setting the atmosphere for the one-day summit, Mexico is displeased with Canadian visa policy and the two countries currently have what Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, calls "rather frosty relations." There are, said Wood, "a number of tensions which have emerged among all the countries," noting unhappiness by the other leaders at the NSA revelations as well as ongoing trade disputes.

What Canadian newspapers have called the "drift" apart of Harper and Obama could make this the first North American Leaders Summit at which American friction with Canada threatens to overshadow the usually dominant differences between Washington and Mexico City. But that would require Harper to do something no Canadian leader has done since Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau used to bedevil President Ronald Reagan. So Obama and Harper most likely will keep their differences out of public view.

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