Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is preparing to step down on Oct. 1 after six years in office. He leaves with soaring approval ratings and a handpicked successor who is poised to maintain his legacy. Although López Obrador’s tenure has been polarizing, both his detractors and supporters concede that he has transformed Mexico’s domestic political scene.
On matters of foreign policy, however, the conventional wisdom holds that López Obrador has been something of a nonentity. Critics suggest that he knows and cares little about the world beyond Mexico. The president rarely traveled abroad, and he routinely skipped important global summits. An initiative early in López Obrador’s term to raffle off his presidential airplane was both a denunciation of previous governments’ excesses and a signal that he planned to stay put.
Yet this isolationist reading of López Obrador’s tenure misses the mark. Instead, his foreign policy reveals a worldview reminiscent of former Mexican President Benito Juárez, who served from 1858 to 1872 as his country was nearly torn apart by a foreign invasion and civil war. Juárez’s blend of principled leadership and pragmatic diplomacy seemingly influenced López Obrador’s nationalist approach to international affairs.
In Mexico, Juárez occupies a stature akin to that of his U.S. contemporary Abraham Lincoln, revered for his integrity in times of national crisis. However, historians and international relations scholars have mostly overlooked Juárez’s global vision.
Juárez rose from humble beginnings as an orphan in rural Oaxaca, eventually becoming the first Indigenous president in the Americas. He led Mexico through profound transformation, guiding the country through divisions over colonial legacies and role of the Catholic clergy toward its consolidation as a liberal state—all while dealing with both a civil war and a foreign invasion.
In the early 1860s, then-French leader Napoleon III viewed the U.S. civil war as an opportunity to restore France’s imperial prestige while challenging the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted U.S. supremacy and declared the Western Hemisphere while closing it to European monarchical rule. A French intervention in Mexico culminated with the imposition of Habsburg Archduke Maximilian as emperor. Juárez’s leadership during the resistance against and defeat of this usurping became his defining moment. In Mexico today, he is said to have ushered in the country’s “second independence.”
López Obrador draws on this history. Visiting Juárez’s birthplace earlier this year, the president called Juárez his “reference and guide,” suggesting that he seeks inspiration if not counsel from his 19th-century predecessor. “Juárez is still among us,” López Obrador said at the time. Portraits of Juárez adorn the president’s private offices as well as the National Palace. Echoing the late leader’s rhetoric, López Obrador often uses the adjective “republican” to describe his policies.
López Obrador’s reverence of Juárez has been noted domestically, but observers rarely make the connection to his foreign policy—perhaps due to analysts’ dismissal of both men’s international visions. Despite his historical importance, Juárez is understood more as a political survivor than a visionary. But his worldview was nuanced and intricate.
Juárez and his coalition possessed a coherent internationalist worldview. Rejecting imperialism and monarchy as inherently illiberal, Juárez and his supporters argued for organizing world politics in accordance with what we now dub “republican internationalist” principles: popular sovereignty, equality of states, peaceful settlement of disputes, and a rejection of foreign intervention legitimated by “civilizing missions.” He prized the “fraternity” of other republics, which was reflected in his relations with the rest of Spanish America and his hope for more positive ties with the United States after Lincoln’s 1860 election.
In practice, Juárez’s principles were tempered by pragmatism. After all, his Mexican republic was broke and overmatched by Europe’s leading land power. Although they were briefly victorious against French expeditionary forces in Puebla on May 5, 1862, Juárez and his government were soon chased out of Mexico City by French reinforcements. The liberal government survived by trapsing across Mexico’s vast territory, becoming a republic with an itinerant capital.
Although Juárez’s opposition to France and its puppet emperor was unwavering, he struck deals to keep his ragtag government together. With Mexico’s conventional army outmatched, he fomented a guerrilla insurgency and cultivated respect from the United States, which had annexed half of Mexico 20 years before. As a result, Juárez gained U.S. support when Washington emerged from its own civil war.
Juárez’s 150-year-old principles cast light on López Obrador’s foreign policy. The outgoing president’s foreign-policy rhetoric revives many aspects of republican internationalism. A prime example is his frequent invocation of fraternity, a concept that is cherished by juaristas—supporters of Juárez and his ideas—and central to republican thought.
López Obrador, like Juárez, has employed the term most frequently in relation to other Latin American republics. But López Obrador has also said that he sees his government as a global “promoter of fraternity.” During Mexico’s turn as a rotating member of the United Nations Security Council in 2021 and 2022, its signature proposal was the Global Fraternity and Welfare Plan, which sought to reinvigorate U.N. efforts against extreme poverty.
López Obrador also favors the term “popular sovereignty”—the cornerstone of the juarista vision, and one that was still radical for European governments in the mid-1800s—to assert Mexico’s international independence and equality.
López Obrador’s sense of international law also has a distinctly juarista flavor. In the mid-1800s, international law referred primarily to the practices of European great powers and was used to legitimize military intervention in Latin American countries, where the standing of recently formed republics was ambiguous at best. Incursions were legal when great powers decided that their nationals or investments were at risk. Those powers turned to strategies such as blockades and interventions to capture customs revenues, including an earlier French intervention in Mexico in 1838 known as the Pastry War.
After Mexico declared a moratorium on repayments, the same pretext justified France’s 1861 invasion, with the initial support of Britain and Spain. Mexico’s foreign debt had swelled during decades of civil conflicts, which undermined the government’s ability to generate tax revenues. Boxed in by unpayable sums, Juárez—a lawyer himself—recast international law as a tool to protect weak states, calling for peaceful arbitration of debt disagreements to replace diplomatic and military coercion. But for European powers and the United States, the use of force to compel repayment was considered a legitimate tool of statecraft.
Earlier this year, when Ecuador’s security forces breached the Mexican Embassy in Quito to arrest a former Ecuadoran vice president who had sought refuge there from corruption charges, López Obrador echoed one of Juárez most-quoted lines: “Among individuals, as among nations, peace is respect for the rights of others.” Without international law, López Obrador said, “it’s the rule of the strongest,” adding that he planned to take the matter to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) because “Mexico must be respected.”
López Obrador complained that the United States was “ambiguous” in its initial response to the incursion. Shortly afterward, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan took a stronger stance, condemning the event as a blatant breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which establishes the sanctity of embassies.
For López Obrador, international law must protect sovereign rights against the use of force. When discussing the Ecuador debacle, the Mexican president said, “We are juaristas; nothing by force and everything by reason and law.” To gain this respect from their “Ecuadorian brothers,” in López Obrador’s words, Mexico turned to the ICJ to demand full protection of its embassy and diplomatic residences. (In May, the court rejected emergency measures.)
But Juárez also knew that principles can clash with messy reality. Mexico’s muddled response to current events in Venezuela offers a case in point. Since elections widely believed to be fraudulent were held on July 28, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s lack of a popular mandate has become undeniable. International pressure on Maduro has grown, including from leftist leaders such as Chilean President Gabriel Boric.
By contrast, López Obrador has seemed open to Maduro’s claims of victory. He has avoided criticizing Maduro or the vote directly while calling U.S. recognition of the opposition’s victory “an imprudence” and dubbing the Organization of American States, which also rejected the election results, “an embarrassment.” The Mexican president’s instinctual rejection of intervention and foreign tutelage clashes with his usual evocations of popular sovereignty.
Observers have often read Mexico’s recent relations with the United States through the lens of López Obrador’s supposed populist sympathies with former U.S. President Donald Trump. Juárez, in contrast, was no populist. Yet both he and López Obrador governed alongside a deeply polarized United States—a division that elicited a mix of principle and pragmatism from both presidents.
Juárez initially found himself dependent on U.S. President James Buchanan, who championed slavery and territorial expansion at Mexico’s expense. Like other advocates of U.S. manifest destiny, Buchanan hoped to buy or conquer more of northern Mexico for possible incorporation as new slave states. Juárez was a resolute opponent of slavery but nonetheless made a deal to safeguard his republic, granting the United States extensive transit rights in Mexico in exchange for funds and naval assistance.
Perhaps winkingly, López Obrador has invoked Juárez in his dealings with the United States. He appeared in front of portraits of Juárez at key moments, including his first meeting with Trump administration officials in 2018. In a separate visit to the Trump White House, López Obrador donned a juarista tie.
But like Juárez, López Obrador’s nationalist impulses have also been tempered by Machiavellian pragmatism. He may chafe at U.S. presumptions and international hierarchies, but he has cut asymmetrical bargains when the chips are down. This instinct was clear in negotiations to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement, and in López Obrador’s often calculating use of migration to gain leverage with U.S. government on issues ranging from trade to counternarcotics operations.
When circumstances allow, juarista instincts resurface. López Obrador converted his popularity into a landslide victory for his chosen successor, Claudia Sheinbaum. The election also gave him a brief window with an expanded legislative majority, which he has used to advance a controversial reform of Mexico’s judiciary. López Obrador invoked Juárez and denounced judges as an unjustly protected caste. Juárez himself was the head of the Supreme Court before acceding to the presidency; his name is associated with a reform that strengthened the Mexican justice system by eliminating the legal privileges of the church and the military.
López Obrador’s latest move—which risks undermining the rule of law that Juárez cherished by installing elected, likely pro-government judges—drew statements of concern from the United States and Canada. In response to these perceived incursions into domestic affairs, López Obrador “paused” relations with them.
This reaction echoes what the late historian Daniel Cosío Villegas termed the Juárez Doctrine: Diplomatic relations would be maintained only when Mexican sovereignty was honored. Until his death, Juárez refused to reestablish diplomatic ties with the European powers that had recognized Maximilian—unless it was on Mexico’s terms.
Even as he leaves office, López Obrador’s republican internationalist disposition will likely continue in Mexico. Principles of popular sovereignty, equality, and nonintervention resonate with a long Mexican tradition that is embodied by Juárez. López Obrador proved remarkably effective at aligning diverse actors under his political banner and garnering public support. His foreign policy has been an important, if misunderstood, component of that.