Integrated Country Strategy for Mexico

Selected to a 10-student cohort tasked with building a complete Integrated Country Strategy for U.S.–Mexico relations and presenting it to officials at the U.S. State Department. The kind of brief a Foreign Service Officer would walk into on their first day at the Mexico desk.

The brief

Treat Mexico as a real country desk inside the State Department. Identify the economic levers, model the projections, and surface the recommendations that a Foreign Service Officer would actually want on their first day.

What we delivered

Identified four economic constraints on bilateral growth, with quantitative modeling behind each
Surfaced three growth opportunities for U.S.–Mexico economic policy, prioritized by feasibility and political cost
Presented the strategy to State Department officials and fielded live questions on assumptions, methodology, and trade-offs
Coordinated across economics, security, and cultural-affairs sub-teams to keep the brief coherent end to end

What I took from it

Policy work is half analysis and half translation. The hardest part of the project was not finding the data. It was condensing months of research into a half-hour briefing that a busy diplomat could absorb, push back on, and walk away with.