What Biden, Trudeau and López Obrador can do for you

After a five-year hiatus, North America’s top government leaders will gather in Washington Thursday for the North American Leaders´ Summit. This is good news for the citizens of North America, whose future prosperity, well-being and security are inextricably tied to joint decisions in Mexico City, Ottawa and Washington.

The meeting is long overdue. President Joe Biden, with a bipartisan congressional win on infrastructure under his belt, will host Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who will arrive in Washington with a renewed mandate following recent general elections, and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, on what will be his third international trip, all three to the United States.

As the pandemic continues to evolve and the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) enters its second year, pandemic and economic recovery will be at the top of the agenda. The summit will be an opportunity to think strategically on these and other key issues. In its announcement, the White House struck the right notes in that direction by also highlighting collaboration on migration, the need to respond to regional and global challenges and by unequivocally stating that North America is “the most competitive and dynamic region in the world”.

How high will the leaders set their sights? They each face political realities at home and diverging public policy outlooks from energy to climate change might limit the range and breadth of ambition. However, there is more than enough common ground to signal that the leadership of the world’s largest trading bloc is actively engaged and working together to strengthen its position in today’s increasingly competitive international arena.

What might a viable North American road map look like?

Pandemic recovery and preparedness: Hundreds of thousands of North American lives have been lost to COVID-19. Its impact has shown that there can be no sustainable recovery without widespread vaccination and preparation for the next pandemic.

Given the level of integration and intensity of cross-border flows, a coordinated approach is essential. A comprehensive North American pandemic response and preparedness strategy encompassing vaccine development, supply and distribution, testing and rapid communication and response mechanisms that also builds upon previous cooperation and lessons learned, will strengthen resilience and safeguard the economic recovery that is now taking hold.

Border coordination: This newspaper has eloquently reported on the human dimension of the reopening of the Texas-Mexico border. Similar stories of families reunited and of highly intertwined binational communities coming together once again stretch along the almost 7,500 miles of shared borders with Canada and Mexico.

On the economic front the shutdown hit hard, disrupting finely tuned supply chains and slowing down our trillion-dollar-plus trilateral trade flows. Unsynchronized border-related decisions increased the negative impact of the shutdown.

Without undermining any country’s sovereign prerogatives, new joint pandemic response border protocols can mitigate economic costs, inject certainty to business decisions and lessen the disruption to millions of North Americans whose lives straddle an international border.

USMCA and beyond: The agreement is North America’s best card in the increasingly cutthroat global race for trade and investment. As it enters its second year, the leaders should instruct their administrations to continue to move expeditiously toward full implementation, to work closely with the business community and to undertake joint outreach on the new provisions and benefits to key trading partners in Asia and Europe.

The economic agenda goes well beyond USMCA. Canada and Mexico have parallel dialogues with the United States that include issues that would benefit from sustained trilateral follow-up beyond the summit conversations. Supply chain resilience and nearshoring, for example, are ripe for this approach.

Given current supply chain bottlenecks likely to stretch well into next year, a new North American Sea Ports Dialogue could be a forward-looking addition to the trilateral cooperation framework.

Migration: Washington and Mexico City have prioritized development cooperation and increased investment in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras as a means to tackle the root causes of migration. It’s a complex, long-term challenge with regional implications that has not been addressed in the past from a North American perspective.

Canada, with its respected track record on development cooperation both in Central America and the Caribbean Basin, can add heft and credibility to initiatives on this front.

Finally, although the current bandwidth for trilateral talks may be narrow on some issues, the summit is a timely opportunity to reaffirm the importance of democratic values and human rights in our hemisphere and beyond, as well as for off-the-agenda frank conversations on areas of concern or disagreement.

Mexico has already announced that it will host the next summit in 2023, marking a welcome return to normalcy in a dialogue that, for the sake of North America’s future, should become a frequent habit and not a sporadic exception.

Julián Ventura was Mexico’s deputy secretary of external affairs from December 2018 to January 2021. He wrote this column for the Dallas Morning News.