What’s in a simple name change? It seems like potentially quite a lot.
Mexico is one of the countries most exposed to the potential economic and political fallout from Donald J Trump’s second-term as president. Its economy is almost totally dependent on the US, with over 80% of its exports going to its northern neighbour. For over a year threats of punitive tariffs and even unilateral military intervention in Mexico’s drugs wars have poured forth from the mouths not just of Trump and his closest allies, but also senior Republican politicians more broadly.
To what extent this can be put down to bluster and bluff time will soon tell. As Michael Hudson warned a few days ago, if Trump makes good on his trade and immigration threats (which are also economic threats) against Mexico, Mexico could end up suffering a severe economic crisis or even default on its dollar debt.
New Name, Different Reality?
If we cast out minds back, Trump’s first term began in similar fashion, with a barrage of dire threats and warnings, only for Mexico’s economy to emerge as arguably the biggest beneficiary of Trump’s trade war with China. But things could be markedly different this time round. With no hopes of re-election, Trump has a whole lot less to lose. He has also been spared the permanent distraction of a Russiagate scandal and has generally appointed loyal personnel, as opposed to swamp rats like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, to most of the key positions.
Words have already turned into actions. In his first week back in power, Trump deployed thousands of military personnel after declaring an emergency on the common border; he has designated Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations and begun deporting large numbers of migrants to Mexico. To cap things off, on Friday the Trump administration’s Interior Department announced that it had officially changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, as well as the Alaskan peak Denali to Mount McKinley.
A day later, Trump told a crowd during a visit to Las Vegas:
“We’re renaming the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, and you know what? Mexico was delighted when it heard about it. They said, ‘This is great.’”
That, of course, is Trump’s version of events packaged and doled out to his MAGA fans in Nevada, much as he told MAGA fans back in 2016 and 2017 that Mexico would end up paying for the construction of the border wall. In reality, Mexico’s Sheinbaum government has reacted firmly but calmly to Trump’s moves, emphasising that his proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico will only apply to the US’ continental shelf.
Trump’s rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico is an “attempt at symbolic and expansionist appropriation linked to strategic and economic interests, particular in relation to certain natural resources,” claims an article in National Autonomous University of Mexico’s global magazine. “The name ‘Gulf of America’ suggests an intention to associate this geographic space directly with the United States, which could modify the international perception of that space.”
The name “Gulf of Mexico” has appeared on European maps since the 16th century, long before the existence of the United States of America. Over the past century, the name has also been institutionalised by international organizations such as the International Geographic Union and the United Nations. As such, it seems unlikely that the term “Gulf of America” will catch on fast, if at all. Even Washington’s Five-Eye partner, the UK, has said it will continue to use the original name, Gulf of Mexico, unless the new name gains widespread use in the English language, according to The Telegraph.
An Auspicious Omen
In his executive order, Trump asks the Board on Geographic Names “to honor the contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans” and change its policies and procedures to reflect that.
“In accordance with President Donald J. Trump’s recent executive order, the Department of the Interior is proud to announce the implementation of name restorations that honor the legacy of American greatness, with efforts already underway,” the Interior Department said in a statement. “As directed by the President, the Gulf of Mexico will now officially be known as the Gulf of America and North America’s highest peak will once again bear the name Mount McKinley.”
It is an auspicious omen for the US’ nearest neighbours given that President William McKinley (1897-1901) was president during one of the most expansionist periods in US history. Before his assassination in 1901, McKinley had turned the Philippines into a US colony, taken possession of Guam and Puerto Rico, annexed Hawaii, and made Cuba into a protectorate. In the Philippine–American War alone, at least 200,000 local civilians perished, with some estimates reaching as high as one million.
Like his 19th century idol, Trump seems keen to usher in a new era of territorial expansion for the United States, whether through the purchase of Greenland or the retaking of the Panama Canal. In a recent speech, Trump told a rally that the US “may be a substantially enlarged country in the not-too-distant future”:
For years, for decades, we were the same size to the square foot, probably got smaller actually. But we might be an enlarged country pretty soon. And one of the things we’re going to be doing is “drill, baby, drill. Because that’s going to bring everything down.”
By “everything”, I assume Trump was referring to the prices of everything, not literally everything, but who knows? Everybody cheered anyway.
What’s in a Name?
Mexico, of course, has cause for concern. It has already lost more than half of its territory to US conquest. According to the renowned Mexican-Lebanese geopolitical analyst Alfredo Jalife, it has suffered no fewer than 13 separate incursions from its northern neighbour since gaining independence from Spain in 1810. Could it lose even more of its land (or sea)? Will the Trump administration’s rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico have genuine geostrategic implications, or will it, like so many rebranding exercises, be a purely superficial upgrade (or downgrade)?
For the moment, it’s impossible to tell. But Mexico should be on guard. Although it may seem like a symbolic gesture with farcical undertones aimed largely at Trump’s base, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America is, as notes a report in the Mexican newspaper El Universal, “fraught with potential political, diplomatic, economic and legal implications that could transform the dynamics of international relations as well as directly impact the countries that share this gigantic maritime area, including its strategic resources.”
Those resources include the gulf’s huge deposits of oil and gas. According to data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Gulf of Mexico accounts for 14% of total US crude oil production and 5% of total dry natural gas production. These resources are critical to US energy independence. The Gulf of Mexico is also a vital nerve centre for international maritime trade. More than 60% of US grain exports — equivalent to 30 million tons — leave ports located in this region, according to the National Association of Grain Exporters.
At a recent forum, Martha Bárcena Coqui, who was Mexico’s ambassador to the United States between December 2018 and February 2021, suggested the name change could be a first move toward starting to reclaim territory where there is oil.
The Gulf of Mexico has a total area of around 1.6 million square kilometres, of which just over half (829,000 square kilometres) belongs to Mexico. The US owns 662,000 square kilometres. Most of the rest belongs to Cuba. There are also two large areas of overlapping interests that are believed to be rich in oil and gas deposits — the so-called Eastern and Western Gaps of the Gulf of Mexico,” which are commonly known as “Doughnut Holes”.
These delineations are clearly defined and supported by international law. But it as yet unclear just what the Trump administration’s intentions are concerning the Gulf. According to the US historian Douglas Brinkley, “the Gulf of Mexico is the cradle of US economic and military expansion.” Trump’s proposal to change its name, he said, is not only designed to reinforce his vision of America First, but also sends a clear message to the rest of the world about US intentions to reassert its control over strategic areas:
“[T]hese types of symbolic gestures are a form of coercive diplomacy. By renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the United States is redefining its role as a global leader, but it is doing so in a way that upsets its allies and neighbours.”
There are few areas more strategically — and these days, economically — important to Washington than its southern neighbour, Mexico, which is not only the US’ largest trade partner but is pivotal to US plans to “nearshore” its supply chains away from China. But Mexico has something the US government and energy corporations apparently covet: huge deposits of as yet unexploited oil and gas embedded within in its eastern seabed.
“Current technologies allow drilling at depths greater than 10,000 meters, which has increased the interest of powers, such as the United States, in the Gulf’s deep waters, says Héctor Mendoza Vargas, a researcher at the Institute of Geography of the UNAM:
Today, pipelines are manufactured in a single piece, which avoids pressure problems and facilitates the safe extraction of oil. The Gulf of Mexico is not only economically important, but also geopolitically. Its location connects key ports, such as Veracruz, Tampico, New Orleans, and Progreso, making it a strategic node for international trade and communications.
For over a decade Jalife has been warning about the US’ territorial ambitions in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2013, he wrote in La Jornada that “Mexico seems trapped with no way out in the US’ geostrategic ambitions to control the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, as part of its new military/energy and security redesign… amid the advent of the new tripolar world order that it now shares with Russia and China”:
In the crosshairs would be the plethoric hydrocarbon deposits in the Gulf of Mexico, which the US wants to rename the
Gulf of the United States, which seems to revive the US/Dutch geo-strategist Nicholas John Spykman’s concept of the “US’ Mediterranean Sea” — a mare nostrum similar to that of the Roman Empire, which comprises the surface of the Gulf of Mexico/Gulf of the United States (1.55 million square kilometres) and the Caribbean Sea (2,754 million square kilometres) that in total yield an area of 4,304 million square kilometres
As we have noted in recent articles, the US is partially retrenching to its main sphere of interest: North and Central America and its environs. According to Jalife, it will be a very serious error on the part of both the Mexican government and political commentators in the country not to take Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico seriously:
It’s a mistake to personalise this. Behind Trump is the majority of the US Congress, the Senate, the electoral vote, and the Supreme Court… Everything about the Gulf of Mexico reeks of petrol and gas. The US part of the Gulf has been largely exhausted while the Mexican part is more or less untouched.
The main reason for this is that Mexico’s national state-owned oil company Petróleos de Mexico, aka Pemex, doesn’t have the capital, or sometimes expertise, to drill in the Gulf’s deep waters. In 2014, the then-Enrique Peña Nieto’s government opened up the country’s oil sector to international competition, making it possible for foreign oil majors to win tenders and begin drilling in deeper waters, with Pemex as little more than a minor partner in many of the projects. It was meant to be the final straw for the country’s state-owned oil giant.
But when Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador came to power in 2018, he placed a moratorium on oil exploration in the gulf and tried to halt or even reverse many of Peña Nieto’s privatisation efforts, with a particular focus on restoring Pemex’s refining capacity, so far with mixed results.
Early indications suggest his successor, Sheinbaum, will continue rolling back Peña Nieto’s market-friendly energy reforms by prioritizing state control of the sector and reducing the role played by private companies. In November, she and her ruling Morena party approved sweeping changes to Mexico’s electricity and hydrocarbons industries by reclassifying state-owned enterprises Pemex and CFE from productive to public companies.
As a result of all this, there is a stark contrast between the scale of drilling activity in each part of the Gulf of Mexico. In the gulf’s US waters, oil companies have been pumping oil for years from deep waters, defined as anything below 500 meters (1,640 feet). Indeed, the US has just 12 years of gas left (at current consumption levels and excluding unproven reserves), according to Worldometer (h/t SocalJimObjects).
Meanwhile, Pemex officials estimate that as many as 50 billion barrels of oil may still reside in the depths of Mexico’s side of the gulf, more than all their proven reserves on land and in shallower waters. As for the Cuban part, there has been little drilling at all, partly due to the constraints imposed by the US embargo. The communist country is currently mired in its worst energy crisis in decades, and is receiving emergency supplies of oil and gas from a number of countries including Mexico.
Jalife is one of few observers, Mexican or otherwise, to point out that Trump is not the first contemporary US politician to propose changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico. In 2012, Mississippi State Rep. Steve Holland, a democrat, introduced a bill, known as HB 150, calling for the part of the Gulf of Mexico that is bordered by Mississippi to be renamed the “Gulf of America.” In the end, the proposal was not even voted on. After igniting a storm of protest among Hispanic voters, Holland insisted that the bill was meant as a satirical spoof.
Whether true or not, Trump’s version of it could soon be reality. Just today, Google Maps announced that it will soon rename the body of water to “Gulf of America” for users in the United States after it is updated in the US government system in response to Trump’s executive order.
Of course, it’s perfectly possible that Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is purely an exercise in political posturing, aimed primarily at his voter base. Lest we forget, Mexico and the US have long had different names for the river that forms a natural boundary between the US and Mexico south of El Paso, with the Mexicans calling it Rio Bravo and the USians, Rio Grande.
Octavio Pescador, a UCLA academic and research analyst, told El Universal that “any movement that alters the perception or management of the Gulf of Mexico could have direct consequences on US energy security and global oil prices”:
So, I don’t think anything out of the ordinary will happen because of [Trump’s] change of name of the gulf… Donald Trump, within the United States and in his legislation, is going to call it the Gulf of America because he has that power and he is going to use it — but not because he plans to seize maritime territory, because there are territorial maritime limits and they are very well defined and there is an international maritime law that the US Congress recognizes for any arbitration. I don’t think it will go that way.
Likewise, legal analyst James Kraska believes that “the United States cannot, under any circumstances, claim full jurisdiction over the gulf without facing significant legal resistance from Mexico and other international actors.” This includes the need to negotiate any changes to the Gulf’s international waters in multilateral forums, such as the International Maritime Organization(IMO).
But since when did the US care about international law? Israel, with the direct help and support of the US and the UK, is carrying out a genocide in Gaza while trying to colonise large swathes of the Middle East as part of its plans to establish a “Greater Israel”. Like Netanyahu, Trump appears to be hankering after a similar expansionist project. As Giles Paris writes in an op-ed for Le Monde in English, Trump clearly intends to redraw US borders. Whether that will include not just land but sea, time will soon tell.
