The negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement are fundamentally about power—specifically, which segment of capital gets to capture the surplus generated by automotive production.

The United States is pushing to tighten “rules of origin,” demanding that a higher share of automotive content be produced domestically or within higher-wage North American facilities. On the surface, this is presented as industrial policy or even national economic strategy.

But at a deeper level, it reflects the internal contradictions of a deeply integrated system that has spent decades dispersing production across borders in search of lower labor costs and higher profitability.

Mexico’s role in this system has been to provide comparatively lower-wage labor within a tightly controlled manufacturing chain, while the United States and Canada have retained higher-value segments of production and financial control.

What is now being renegotiated is not whether integration continues, but who captures more of the value created by that integration.

The exclusion of Canada from early rounds of talks is itself telling: it signals that this is not a neutral multilateral adjustment but a series of asymmetric bargaining positions, shaped by relative economic and political leverage.

At the same time, tariffs on autos, steel, and aluminium reveal something even more important: the partial breakdown of the neoliberal consensus that promised frictionless trade and efficient global allocation of production.

The proposed tightening of steel sourcing rules—requiring North American “melted and poured” inputs—illustrates this clearly. It is an attempt to cordon off segments of global supply chains and redirect value flows back toward domestic industrial capital.

In short, this is not about “free trade versus protectionism” in any simple sense. It is about the reorganisation of commercial production under conditions where the old global arrangements no longer produce stable political or economic outcomes for ruling interests.