Energy relations in North America: from three trilateral amigos to three bilateral acquaintance

North America is an energy powerhouse with vast reserves of oil, natural gas, and critical minerals, and substantial potential to generate electricity. Canada, the United States and Mexico have the potential to become a formidable “energy bloc.” In theory, at least. In practice, economic, environmental, security, and political factors in recent years have shaped domestic, bilateral, and trilateral energy relations in ways that leave the potential for a “North American energy idea” an image in the rear-view mirror. Although energy trade between the three countries has grown over the twenty-first century, relationships between the three governments have descended from their height of the “three amigos” in the early 2000s to something more like three bilateral acquaintances in the 2020s. This shift is due to a number of factors, chief among them the reduction in US energy security concerns as American oil and gas production has soared, the ascendance of climate change imperatives and governments’ focus on the domestic scene to address them, and the rise of protectionism in the US and energy nationalism in Mexico under recent administrations. This chapter traces this shift. It begins with an overview of the imperatives of the market, environmental, security, and social acceptance that governments must address when developing energy policy. It then uses this framework to explore the evolution of domestic energy policy in each of the three North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries over the last five decades, with an emphasis on recent developments under Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, American President Joe Biden, and Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). The following section examines the evolution of trilateral and bilateral relationships over time, tracing the evolution from the three (trilateral) amigos pursuing robust energy collaboration to strengthen energy security to the three (bilateral) acquaintances where political leaders’ attention is mainly focused on the domestic scene. The chapter concludes that although a return to more robust bilateral and trilateral collaboration could strengthen North American energy security, sustainability, and competitiveness, this is unlikely to materialize in the current domestic political, economic, and energy context in each country.

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