After "Gulf of America" Rebranding, Will Trump Admin Set Its Sights on Mexico's Oil and Gas? | naked capitalism

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

84% : Like his idol, Trump seems keen to usher in a new era of territorial expansion for the United States, and is, to my knowledge, the first US president to speak brazenly about annexing other territories since McKinley.
58% : 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.
57% : 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.
57% : 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.
56% : According to data from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), approximately 17% of U.S. oil production comes from the Gulf of Mexico.
53% : Behind Trump is the majority of the US Congress, the Senate, the electoral vote, and the Supreme Court...
52% : 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).
52% : 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.
50% : 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.
50% : Although it may seem like a symbolic gesture with farcical undertones, 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.
48% : So far, President Trump has made his intentions fairly clear regarding Mexico.
44% : 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.
43% : 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.
37% : As Giles Paris writes in an op-ed for Le Monde in English, Trump clearly intends to redraw US borders.
35% : The Gulf of Mexico is also a vital nerve centre for international maritime trade.
34% : "By "everything", I assume Trump was referring to the prices of everything, not literally everything, but who knows?
33% : 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.
32% : 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?
31% : With no hopes of re-election, Trump has a whole lot less to lose this time round.
30% : 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.
26% : Threats of punitive tariffs and even unilateral military intervention in Mexico's drugs wars have been pouring forth from the mouths not just of Trump and his closest allies, but also senior Republican politicians more broadly.
22% : Like Netanyahu, Trump appears to be hankering after a similar neocolonial project.
15% : 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.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.