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Cold War 2.0 in Mexico: US and Russian Embassies Lock Horns Over International Study Programs

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The German embassy also joined the pile-on, with slapstick consequences.

One of the many rudimentary tasks of embassies and consulates is to promote and support educational exchange programs, scholarships, and academic partnerships with host countries. This is precisely what Russia’s embassy in Mexico has been doing on social media. On January 8, it posted a tweet informing young Mexican students that there was only one week left for them to apply for a scholarship to study at a Russian university during the 2025-26 academic year.

However, within a few days, the US and German embassies in Mexico had hijacked the thread. First, the US embassy posted a tweet on Jan 13 warning about study and work opportunities in Russia, recalling that “a level 4 travel alert for travel to Russia remains in effect” — for USians, of course, not Mexicans:

“We urge all prospective students who are offered study opportunities in Russia to carefully review the details of the scholarship or work-study program for which they have been recruited, in order to ensure that the program is legitimate and that the work or study undertaken matches the advertised information. We remind US citizens that a level 4 travel alert on travel to Russia remains in effect.”

“Students should be aware of the dangers of being forced into alternative activities in Russia’s defence industry upon their arrival. According to media reports, third-country nationals have come to Russia with false promises and have been forced to work in the Russian defence industry and, in some cases, to fight in its war against Ukraine.”

The tweet produced some interesting responses:

Translation: “LOL, of course I’m going to study in a decadent empire — an empire with an opioid crisis”, to which the US responded (with a smiling emoji):

The United States is a country where criticism is allowed, and that is what allows us to continue improving.

And that was an open invitation for the following tweet (translation: “careful what you say, Daddy”) featuring a photograph of the independent journalist Sam Husseini being forcibly picked up and dragged from a State Department press conference after confronting Secretary of State Anthony Blinken about his support for Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, which happened just two days after the US embassy’s tweet:

Germany Joins the Fray

On Jan 14th, Germany’s embassy in Mexico piled on with a tweet of its own, titled:

“Study in Russia? Better choose Germany!”

The tweet suggested that instead of heading to Russia, Mexican students would be better off going to Germany, where “they will find prestigious universities and better quality of life”. The German embassy also dutifully retweeted the message posted by the US embassy.

In a response dripping with sarcasm, the Russian embassy thanked its US counterpart for its interest in Russia’s international scholarship program. It also pointed out that attending a Russian university is a great way to “broaden horizons” in this transitional period to a multipolar world, adding that the program is also open to “our American friends.” 

As for the German embassy, if its intention was to hamper Russia’s PR campaign for its study programs, it seems to have backfired completely. For a start, far more young, aspiring Mexicans will have heard about those programs thanks to the US and German embassies’ ham-fisted attempts at online trolling.

Some X users posted videos of German police beating pro-Palestine protesters, others ridiculed the government for its self-inflicted economic crisis and/or its US vassalage. A common target of their disdain was the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, sometimes shown in photographs alongside Syria’s new “transitional” Prime Minister (and former Al-Qaida kingpin), Mohammed al-Bashir.

For every user that appeared to show a genuine interest in studying in Germany, there were dozens more who scoffed at the idea. One shared the following tweet, suggesting that today’s Germany may not be such a welcoming place for Mexican students:

But the German embassy just kept digging. On Jan 15, the new ambassador, Clemens von Goetze, published an op-ed in El Economista in which he outlined some of the shared challenges facing Germany and Mexico and the need to confront them together. Those challenges apparently include the war in Ukraine, upon which Mexico’s former AMLO and current Sheinbaum governments have maintained a strictly neutral stance, much to Washington and the EU’s chagrin.

The good news for Germany, and Europe as a whole, said von Goetze, is that it no longer depends on Russian gas (paragraph highlighted in bold), which is news to everybody:

For Europe and, above all, for Germany, the energy transition – that is, the abandonment of fossil fuels – represents both a challenge and an opportunity. We have suffered painfully from what energy dependence means.

The effects of Russian aggression continue to seriously affect the European economy and, in particular, Germany’s. When Russia attacked Ukraine in violation of all international law in 2022, we responded by imposing sanctions…. However, these did not include the supply of gas. Russia was the one who arbitrarily failed to comply with its obligations.

In the winter of 2022/23, Europe and Germany managed to become independent from Russian gas in a very short time and have since given a stronger boost to the development of renewable energies.

In 2024, renewable energies contributed 62% to electricity generation and 55% to its consumption in Germany. This allowed prices that had increased considerably at the beginning, to decrease.

What von Goetze doesn’t mention is that even as energy prices in Germany have dropped off, they have settled at a much higher level than pre-2022, leaving the German economy unable to compete with countries like China and the US. As NC’s Connor Gallagher wrote a few months ago, “the biggest problem for Germany is that turning over its foreign policy to US interests runs counter to the economic interests of the majority of Germans — although it should be noted that the wealthiest Germans are making off quite well from all the chaos.”

The rest of the country have had to make ends meet in an economy that is deindustrialising at breakneck pace, with output hovering more than 10% below its pre-Covid peak and unemployment beginning to rise. That economy is “experiencing the longest stagnation of its postwar history by far,” as Timo Wollmershäuser, an economist at Ifo, a Munich-based economic think-tank, told the FT. To compound matters, inflation is once again rearing its ugly head after chalking up four consecutive monthly rises.

The Russian ambassador in Mexico, Nikolay Sofinskiy, responded to von Goetze’s op-ed with an op-ed of his own in the same publication titled “Opening Europeans’ Eyes”. A few choice cuts (machine translated):

We would like to bring clarity to a surreal article by the German Ambassador to Mexico, which seems to be designed to deliberately misinform Mexican society.

Speaking of the conflict in Ukraine, the honourable ambassador omitted to mention that the Kiev regime began the war against its own population in 2014, after a coup d’état. Perhaps, in your next article, you could write about the Minsk Agreements and Angela Merkel’s questionable role…

The ambassador’s comment that Russia is not meeting its obligations to supply gas to Europe is bizarre. Russia is fulfilling its commitments to supply energy resources to the world market, including Europe.

In connection with his statement, the question arises: how is the investigation into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline progressing? Germany continues to fail to act, accepting the violation of its interests by the United States. Germany, before our eyes, has lost its sovereignty over the years, becoming a direct vassal of the United States.

Incidentally, according to Eurostat calculations, EU countries have paid almost 200 billion euros more for gas since the implementation of sanctions against Russia. As a result of this policy, the German economy declined by 0.2% in 2024.

Did Europe give up Russian gas? According to the latest data, in terms of LNG alone, Russia has become the second-largest supplier in Europe. We send a warm Russian greeting to all of Europe.*

Mexico: Washington’s “Number-One National Security Concern”

This latest spat between the US, German and Russian embassies in Mexico is testament not only to the pettiness of US diplomacy or the fawning subservience of German foreign policy apparatchiks to US interests, as if we needed a reminder, but also the vital importance of Mexico to US interests.

It is hard to imagine the US State Department reacting in such an overblown manner to such a non-event in any other country in Latin America. As the Argentine political scientist Atilio Borón notes, it is one thing to have a genuinely left-of-centre, non-aligned government in Brazil or Argentina, it is a whole other thing to have one in Mexico, on the other side of that 3,200 km border:

If you speak to… the imperial strategists in Washington, what are they going to tell you? Look, we are interested in Europe, in England, Israel… but our number-one concern for us in terms of national security is Mexico — a Mexico that we cannot allow to fall into the ‘wrong hands’. Obviously they are careful about saying this out loud just as they are careful about saying that Latin America is the most important region to them.

If we cast our minds back to the first days of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the then-US Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar (the new one, as readers may recall, is former CIA agent and green beret, Ron Johnson), was chiding Mexican lawmakers for daring to invite Russian ambassador to address Mexico’s senate. He then told them, to their faces, that Mexico can never be close to Russia:

“I have here (he said while indicating lapels on his jacket breast) the flags of Mexico, the United States and Ukraine. We have to be in solidarity with Ukraine and against Russia.”

The Russian ambassador was here yesterday making a lot of noise about how Mexico and Russia are so close. This, sorry, can never happen. It can never happen…”

During World War II and the last Cold War, Mexico was a nodal point for international espionage due to its proximity to the US, making it an ideal territory for Nazi, Soviet and American spies to establish their bases. It is well known that at least three former Cold War presidents of Mexico were CIA assets (Luis Echeverría, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Adolfo López Mateos). In 2023, a declassified CIA document indicated that a fourth president, José López Portillo, was also reporting to the agency.  

Small Economic Footprint, Growing Academic Ties

In Mexico today, Russia has a relatively small economic footprint, especially compared to the US, China and Germany, Mexico’s three largest trade partners, but relations between the two governments are strong. And cooperation on the academic front is on the rise. Last month, the Immanuel Kant Federal University of the Baltic (BFU), in collaboration with the University of Guadalajara, inaugurated a neuroscience and education centre on the Mexican university’s campus. There are also plans to create a joint research laboratory.

“The projects will be focused on the application of artificial intelligence for the development of modern communication and spectroscopy systems,” the Russian embassy said in a press statement.

These developments will not have gone unnoticed in Washington — or, for that matter, Langley. As readers may recall, a few months ago a Washington-based Mexican journalist, Dolia Estévez, with very close ties to the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars, a US government think tank, published an article alleging that “Russia is planning to drag Mexico into a spurious conflict with the United States” by “stirring up latent anti-American sentiment in the country over the loss of over half of their territory to the US in the mid-19th century.”

Morena, the party of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the current head of state Claudia Sheinbaum, is, in the words of an alleged Russian government document uncovered by the FBI and cited as the basis for Estévez’s claims, “an easily manipulated centre-left formation with anti-American tendencies, that is favourable to de-dollarisation and a reorientation of Mexico’s economic priorities.” As for Morena’s electoral base, it consists principally of Mexico’s disadvantaged classes, which largely share this anti-American sentiment — again, according to the document cited by Estévez.

As we noted at the time, there is no way of knowing whether the document is real. All we have to go on is the word of the FBI, whose judgment was, to put it mildly, sorely lacking in its “investigation” of Russiagate, as the Durham Report concluded last year. Even by the standards of those who brought us Russiagate, this latest story is riddled with holes, not least of which is the government of Mexico, whose economy is joined at the hip to the US, is somehow favourable to de-dollarisation.

However, it’s not just Estévez claiming that Russian interest and activities in Mexico are on the rise. In 2022, Air Force Gen. Glen VanHerck, head of U.S. Northern Command, even suggested that Mexico is currently home to the “largest portion of GRU members in the world… Those are Russian intelligence personnel, and they keep an eye very closely on their opportunities to have influence on U.S. opportunities and access.”

A large part of Russia’s growing influence in Latin America is through the media. Unlike in Europe and North America, most LatAm countries, including Mexico, have not banned RT. On the contrary, a study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford revealed how RT and the Sputnik news agency have increased their presence in Latin America after the invasion of Ukraine, adding a group of influencers from the region to their team of presenters and journalists. RT is even broadcast on Mexico City’s public transport.

Mexico’s government, like many governments in the region, has tried to chart an independent course on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Meanwhile, the AMLO and Sheinbaum governments, like many of its predecessors, have maintained close ties with Venezuela, Cuba and other US adversaries. And that has seriously annoyed Washington. As the short video below shows, during his confirmation hearing last week Trump’s pick for US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, describes the non-intervention clause in Mexico’s constitution as “frustrating for us at times”:

It’s still too early to tell what direction US foreign policy toward Mexico (and Latin America in general) will take under Trump, though early indications, including the revocation of the Biden administration’s removal of Cuba from US state sponsors of terrorism list, the designation of Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organisations via executive order and Trump’s glib talk about possibly sending US special forces into Mexico,  are far from encouraging.

Of course, the fact that US foreign policy under Trump, assuming he actually delivers on his core goals (a massive, almost insurmountable “IF”), will apparently involve the country retrenching from the conflict in the Ukraine and possibly other distant conflicts and regions in order to shift its focus closer to home also does not bode well for Mexico or North America as a whole (or Panama, Greenland, Venezuela, etc).

 

* Alternative sources seems to bear this out. The 2024 State of the EU Energy Union report showed that the bloc still relies on Russia for close to 20% of its gas supplies. Russia remains the second-largest provider after Norway and ahead of the US. According to Politico, during the first 15 days of 2025, the European Union’s 27 countries imported 837,300 metric tons of liquefied natural gas from Russia, up from the 760,100 tons brought in during the same period last year.

 

 

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6 comments

  1. The Rev Kev

    Had a good laugh at the antics of the US and German Embassies in trying to denigrate a Russian educational offer. It was just like a “Yes Minister” episode. Of course for the US the problems remains to select charismatic professionals into their Ambassador positions but instead you get people like Ken Salazar and now to make it far worse, you now have Marco Rubio as SecState. He of course speaks Spanish which you think would be an advantage but it is not. When ‘Bloody’ Blinken spoke, Mexico would have to wait for a translation which may have or may not have been accurate. But when Rubio speaks, the Mexicans will know exactly what he is saying – including all the nuances. For the US, that is not good. And Trump himself is ham-fisted and may think that insulting Mexicans is just another negotiating tactic. Trying to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico has put them on notice what to expect and Trump is just as likely to announce that he wants Claudia Sheinbaum to step down from government like he has demanded that Maduro step down from being President of Venezuela. And If Trump tries to send the US military into Mexico, he may end up with his own Operation Eagle Claw. Fun times ahead-

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Eagle_Claw

    Reply ↓
  2. lyman alpha blob

    Great article, thank Nick.

    And please, nobody tell the spooks that Trotsky used to live in Mexico or they’ll probably nuke the place, just to be on the safe side.

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    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      Yeah, definitely not. It’s just a few miles down the road from where I’m currently staying. Imagine what they would say/do if they found out that Trotsky’s former residence had been turned into a museum dedicated to his life’s work and that it attracts people from all around the world.

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  3. Expat2uruguay

    Thank you Nick. The possibility of the United States turning its tender mercies to South America has long been a fear of mine. Fortunately I’m still pretty far away, but the US embassy here while not big, is heavily fortified.

    Reply ↓

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