When the United States hosted the World Cup for the first time in 1994, it was not just a celebration of sport but of a newly integrated North America.
The North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico went into effect Jan. 1 that year. “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers between our three nations,” President Bill Clinton said at the signing ceremony in Washington.
That summer, fans poured into U.S. stadiums. The tournament remains the most attended World Cup in history, drawing 3.6 million spectators. Commentators dubbed it the “NAFTA World Cup.”
Why We Wrote This
The last time World Cup games were played here in the United States, NAFTA was just going into effect. The long, successful trade relationship across North America is now under serious strain.
Thirty-two years later, World Cup matches are being played in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. It is the first time FIFA has awarded hosting rights to three countries, making it a truly continental World Cup. On the surface, it suggests hemispheric harmony.
Instead, North America faces a moment of profound strain. President Donald Trump has imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, mused about making Canada the “51st state,” and threatened military action against Mexican drug cartels. The tension also comes as the three countries approach a July 1 deadline to review their trilateral trade agreement.
Officials still promote the tournament as a catalyst for regional cooperation. José Pablo Ampudia, who manages Mexican government engagement for this year’s World Cup, said at a recent Atlantic Council event that soccer is providing an “excuse for the three governments to align.”
Yet hopes that the summer of 2026 might strengthen a shared North American identity have faded, at a time when many observers argue it’s needed more than ever.
“If the result of the [trade] negotiations is for things to remain the way they already are today, many business people say that’s a relief,” says Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States. It’s a reflection, he says, of “instead of North America aiming high and missing, we aim low and hit.”
In some ways, North America is economically stronger than ever. And no place embodies that more than the Canada Pacific Kansas City (CPKC) railway station in the industrial city of Toluca, some 8,700 feet above sea level in the mountains of central Mexico.
Train conductor Ariel Murguia Cervantes, whose family has worked on Mexican railways for three generations, goes through paperwork for an upcoming voyage. His train, No. MJ28902, will be carrying sandwich bread to the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, linoleum to Bensenville, Illinois, near Chicago, and car parts to Edmonton, Alberta, in western Canada.
It wasn’t until three years ago that these trains seamlessly hauled goods between all three countries.
Alfredo Sosa/Staff
Canada Pacific, founded in 1881, and Kansas City Southern, founded in 1887, merged in 2023 to form CPKC, the only single-
line rail network spanning the continent, 20,000 miles total from the Port of Vancouver in British Columbia to Mexican ports in Lázaro Cárdenas and Veracruz.
It’s the “backbone of North American integration,” says Oscar Del Cueto, president and executive representative of CPKC de México.
Trade between the three countries has grown by more than 400% since NAFTA was signed. Mexico is now the United States’ largest trading partner. Trade between the two countries alone grew from about $81 billion in 1993 to nearly $800 billion in 2023.
Cargo crossing the Mexico-U.S. border by rail has doubled in volume since NAFTA began, says Mr. del Cueto, calling himself a “true believer” in the potential of a united North America.
“Mutually beneficial” or “worst ever”?
While countries in the European Union spent decades building governing institutions and student exchanges to forge a sense of shared identity, North America’s integration has been woven into supply chains, factories, and freight corridors.
“The idea of North America was always an elite-driven project,” says Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute and author of “Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together.” “What really exists today are two very intense relationships between neighbors. But there isn’t an equally strong relationship between Canada and Mexico, or an attempt to create a broader North American identity.”
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan addressed Canada’s Parliament, asking its members to imagine a region connected by “mutually beneficial exchange,” all the way from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.
But Canada entered the NAFTA negotiations reluctantly. It had already secured a bilateral free trade agreement with the U.S. in 1988 and initially saw little advantage in expanding the arrangement to include Mexico. Since then, Canada’s relationship with Mexico has remained ambivalent.
Alfredo Sosa/Staff
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called for middle powers to realign as an insurance against an unpredictable U.S., but hasn’t made a special effort to align more closely with Mexico.
In the last year, Mr. Carney, Mr. Trump, and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo have not spent much time in the same room. In fact, their only private trilateral meeting took place on Dec. 5 for the final World Cup draw in Washington.
During his first term, Mr. Trump called NAFTA “the worst trade deal ever made” and threatened to withdraw from it
altogether. Ultimately, the three countries renegotiated NAFTA under a new name, what Washington now refers to as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. It preserves the basic framework of continental free trade, but the negotiations to get there were fraught.
“I think the idea of the Mexican-American-Canadian grouping is in some ways a shallow idea,” says Asa McKercher, a historian specializing in Canadian foreign policy and Canada-U.S. relations at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.
But even if “North America” is a construct created by a trade deal, it’s become more real over time. Dr. Selee ended his book, published in 2018, arguing that the “frontiers that once separated us will continue to vanish as forces stronger and more dynamic than any presidential order or trade agreement continue to bring us closer together.”
“There will always be a reason to be cooperating,” says Paul Samson, who worked in the Canadian government’s finance
department during the first renegotiation of NAFTA and is currently president of the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
A looming trade deadline
On a recent afternoon outside Toluca, at CPKC’s Puerta México intermodal station, Sergio Mirasol dons a reflective vest and white hard hat and steps into the tight choreography of cranes, trucks, and freight containers. As operations manager, he oversees the loading and unloading of about 200 rail cars each day. Some head for customs inspections, while others move north by rail or on semitrucks, ready to restock local big-box stores.
Alfredo Sosa/Staff
Unlike many of his colleagues, Mr. Mirasol did not inherit this career. He grew up in Chinicuila, Michoacán, where construction work was the family trade. But his own path reflects some of the economic opportunities that NAFTA helped create.
The first person in his family to attend college, he earned a degree in business administration and later joined CPKC’s predecessor. “It’s given me a life that’s less limited,” he says. His children are all in school, and his eldest is in college hoping to pursue an international career.
After 15 years with the company, Mr. Mirasol traveled to Canada for the first time last October, part of a weeklong recognition trip awarded to the Puerta México team for its safety record. “Sometimes, it feels like Canada wants us to have their work culture. A culture of efficiency. It will take time,” he says. But, “with this fusion of cultures, we haven’t stopped learning.”
Gordon Giffin, a former U.S. ambassador to Canada who has argued for even deeper economic integration, says that this North American railway is a symbol of the way “things should evolve, so the three economies are working more efficiently together.”
“We just have to make sure we have the rules … that make the trains [run] on time, euphemistically,” he says.
By July 1, the three countries will need to decide whether to extend their current trilateral deal for another 16 years, or move toward annual reviews for the next decade.
Mr. Sarukhán, the former Mexican ambassador, says that kind of uncertainty is not just an economic problem but also a geopolitical one. “The United States needs to understand that for its recalibration with China to succeed, Canada and Mexico have to be part of that paradigm,” he says. “The risk is three countries that end up turning their backs on one another.”
Outside the promotional buzz, the World Cup might fall short of convincing Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans that they share a common North American identity. But in some ways, it could bring down to earth the connections that have been forged since NAFTA went into effect. When fans travel between countries for soccer matches, they’ll find similar banking systems, airline experiences, and transit rules. That mirrors the North American railway, says Adolfo Soto Ferro, a CPKC engineer and trainer in Mexico.
“The train is the same – here or there. We’re dedicated to the same thing.”