Contemporary U.S. Approaches to North American Regionalism: Armoring NAFTA, or Abandoning it?

North America is increasingly an integrated economic hub, and Canada and Mexico are important to the U.S. (and vice versa) in terms of energy security, trade, cross-border production, and more. This has made regional security and stability more strategically important than the already high level it had attained through geography. In order to understand North America's growing strategic significance, we need to take a closer look at U.S. policy within the region.

In this book, Paul Ashby examines how U.S. now considers North America, defined regionally as the countries within the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as a distinct and strategically important economic and security space. Through closer examination of several policy programs with both Canada and Mexico, Ashby demonstrates how the U.S. is actively constructing a regional, North American security architecture based around, but also operating within NAFTA's perimeters. He contends that increased regional economic integration and important interdependencies spurred by NAFTA are driving, and that these were given far greater impetus by the events and regional impacts of 9/11. North America's growing strategic importance to the U.S. has encouraged it to take regional security more seriously.

Speaking to wider debates of U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, its interests and motivations in International Relations and International Political Economy, and processes of regionalism with regard to political-economic integration. NAFTA-land Security present a clear, important and original argument to all those struggling with how best to understand the overall policy aims that drive U.S. thinking, and how they relate to global trends and developments in U.S. foreign policy.