The Tijuana Model: What Results-Based Diplomacy Looks Like

The Tijuana River case illustrates what accountable bilateral environmental diplomacy can achieve. For decades, more than 200 billion gallons of toxic sewage, trash, and unmanaged stormwater flowed across the US-Mexico border into the Tijuana River Valley, closing Southern California beaches and sickening communities on both sides. It was a public health emergency and a direct threat to national security infrastructure. The US Navy SEALs, three nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, and tens of thousands of sailors are stationed at Coronado, immediately downstream.

Previous agreements had addressed the crisis on paper. Infrastructure projects had been planned and funded. Deadlines had been set and missed. The sewage kept flowing. What changed in 2025 was the composition of a new diplomatic effort. EPA Administrator Zeldin traveled to the region, toured it by helicopter, and met directly with military personnel, local officials, and community representatives. He then negotiated in coordination with Secretary of State Rubio and the National Security Council, bringing together environmental, diplomatic, and national security equities in a single framework. The result was a binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with specific infrastructure deliverables, hard deadlines, and conditioned funding – US Border Water Infrastructure Program dollars tied directly to verified Mexican project completion.

Mexico committed to $93 million in infrastructure improvements. The US International Boundary and Water Commission completed a 10-million-gallon-per-day expansion of the South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant in 100 days. This was a project estimated to take two years. Congressman Scott Peters of San Diego, a Democrat who had worked on the issue for years, captured what made this different:

“I am extremely grateful to Administrator Zeldin for his steadfast dedication to a 100% solution that upholds U.S. obligations and, most importantly, commits Mexico to build, maintain and fund the projects it must have to protect its people now, as well as future population growth.”

The agreement escalated further. In December 2025, the two nations signed Minute 333, holding Mexico to more demanding commitments than any prior framework and incorporating Tijuana’s population growth into its infrastructure planning – a variable absent from each previous agreement. The agreement also mandated a water infrastructure master plan within six months and established an operations and maintenance account at the North American Development Bank to fund long-term system upkeep. The total timeline compression since the July 2025 MOU amounted to approximately 12 years of deferred infrastructure work. This bilateral diplomacy was only achievable through unprecedented intergovernmental commitment, focus, and cooperation.

Why Bilateral Accountability Outperforms Multilateral Aspiration

In a bilateral agreement, there is no crowd to hide in. There are two parties, named obligations, and a specific counterpart who either delivers or does not. Accountability is direct and public, reinforced by reporting requirements – making progress and non-compliance visible to communities, legislators, and diplomats on both sides of the border. A nation that shrugs at the prospect of missing a voluntary COP target responds very differently to the prospect of losing preferential trade terms or watching development finance shift to a more compliant partner. When environmental commitments are negotiated in the same room as trade and economic agreements, by the same officials, they carry real weight. As researchers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have observed, few challenges haunt trade negotiators more than a lack of meaningful deadlines – a problem especially acute at the intersection of trade and environmental policy. The bilateral model resolves that by design.

This logic is already operating across multiple relationships. The EU-US energy framework negotiated in mid-2025 integrated LNG supply agreements, energy security commitments, and trade terms under joint State Department and foreign affairs leadership. This shows how the US is treating energy and environment as central elements of the transatlantic relationship, not peripheral ones. That is the template.

“The Doctrine” Applied Broadly

Environmental statecraft is appearing across the full range of bilateral relationships wherever environmental performance intersects with US economic, energy, or security interests – which is nearly everywhere. It includes conditioning market access on pollution reduction, linking arms transfers to energy infrastructure standards, and tying Export-Import Bank financing to waste management compliance. All of these make environmental performance a relevant variable in the bilateral relationship, one that can be tracked and enforced by the same leaders who built and manage the relationship.

The Middle East context makes this especially urgent. Where environmental infrastructure is already being weaponized, where water access is leveraged as political coercion, shipping lanes are turned into ecological battlefields, and proxy networks exploit humanitarian crises born of environmental degradation. The United States needs to leverage a foreign policy doctrine that treats the environment not as a philanthropic concern but as a strategic one. That means bilateral agreements with partners in the region that tie environmental remediation to security cooperation, condition military and economic assistance on measurable improvements in water governance and pollution control, and build the interagency architecture to monitor and enforce those commitments. None of this requires abandoning the aspiration goals of global environmental cooperation, but it does require recognizing that aspiration is not statecraft. Statecraft requires leverage, accountability, timelines, and consequences.

Conclusion

The Tijuana River is cleaner today than it has been in decades. A public health crisis that had defied resolution for twenty years was addressed in eighteen months – because EPA, State, the NSC, and Treasury sat at the same table and held a partner to account against specific, measurable, conditioned commitments. Across the Middle East, adversaries have already grasped what multilateral environmental diplomacy has been slow to acknowledge – that the environment is not separate from security, economics, and military power. Instead, it is woven through all of them.

Environmental statecraft is not ideological. It is not partisan. It is the recognition that the most durable environmental outcomes come not from collective aspiration, but from the disciplined integration of environmental objectives into the full portfolio of how America engages the world. The model is working. The only question is whether we are paying attention.

—

Alex Vohr is a retired Marine Corps Colonel and combat veteran. He served as a commanding officer, Director of the USMC School of Advanced Warfighting, and as the J4 for US Southern Command. He is the author of Speed Kills and is currently the President of One LNG, a Texas-based energy company.