SINCE PRESIDENT FELIPE CALDERÓN HAD MOBILIZED THE MEXican army and the federal police against organized crime, corruption, and the drug cartels in 2006, the death toll had climbed to tens of thousands each year, and the Mexican government was increasingly concerned about the impact this was having on trade, tourism, and foreign investment. The majority of the killings were the result of increasingly bitter turf wars between rival cartels as they splintered into ever smaller and more desperate factions, fighting over diminishing amounts of lawless territory. Calderón’s government saw this as the necessary consequence of tackling the problem seriously and was determined to hold its nerve, but the human and economic costs were enormous notwithstanding high levels of US aid, and if foreign income was allowed to fall at the same time, the risks to the country’s economy were grave.

So in 2009, the Mexican Foreign Service conducted an inquiry into the country’s international standing and were introduced to me by their contacts in the Chilean diplomatic service. The report of the work I had done with the Bachelet government suggested to the Mexican diplomats that they would hear a different account of the issue from me than the messaging-and-media pitch they were getting from the advertising, branding, and PR agencies. And so, after a series of discussions in Santiago, London, and Mexico City, I was asked to work with Calderón’s government and make recommendations about how Mexico could best tackle the pressing issue of how it was regarded around the world.

The reality of Mexico proved to be very different from my expectations, and those of my friends and family, who seemed to assume I would be instantly killed as I stepped off the plane. (Many people living in the Americas would be surprised to learn how distant, how strange, and how unfamiliar Mexico appears to most Europeans, especially since much of what we know about it is seen through the lens of US popular culture.) The Mexicans turned out to be among the kindest and politest people I had ever met, and I noticed how popular culture had led me to expect the men, in particular, to be tough and scary. Yet, in the main, they exhibited an unfailing and delicate courtesy. I soon formed the view that I’d rather be stuck in a crowded subway in Mexico City than in any other underground railway I’d come across.

But oddly, many Mexicans at the higher end of the socioeconomic scale seemed to have accepted similar ideas about everyday life in Mexico as my European acquaintances. Even in Mexico City, many hundreds of miles from the troubled borderlands, they and their children were constantly surrounded by bodyguards and seldom left the security of their own heavily barricaded homes or their vast, shiny black American SUVs whose preposterously aggressive styling was clearly intended to express their readiness not to drive to places but over things—and no doubt over people too, when necessary. I don’t know how much of this protection was really necessary for people who were neither high-profile millionaires nor prominent politicians, and how much of it was merely a display of status. After all, you have to be pretty precious in order for several other people to dedicate their lives to protecting yours.

On one occasion, the team I was working with at the presidency wanted me to go by helicopter to an urgent meeting on the other side of the city because the traffic was so bad, and I suggested we go by subway instead. They expressed dismay at this idea, and I learned to my surprise that only one of them had ever even tried to take the subway. Eventually I persuaded them to indulge the curiosity of an inexperienced guest. Their surprise when we got out at the other end, thirty minutes after leaving, and found ourselves magically at our destination, usually a three-hour car journey away, was something to behold. (But they still refused to go back to the office on the subway after the meeting.)

When a population’s self-view is as unrepresentative of the lived reality of its country as this, you know you’ve got an interesting patient on your hands. Elsewhere in this vast nation, then the twelfth-largest economy in the world and one of the principal trading partners of the United States, many millions of people were living under plastic sheeting.

At the end of my kick-off meeting with President Calderón, he asked me a question which leaders all too seldom ask: “How will we know if this has worked?” I ran through the various performance indicators we would need to set up in order to measure the effectiveness of the work we conducted, but somehow I felt I hadn’t answered the question in quite the same spirit in which it had been asked.

It was only in the small hours of the next morning that an answer occurred to me that really seemed to make sense, and I shared it with Calderón at our next meeting. The true mark of success, I said, would be if we could know that a random human being—a thirteen-year-old girl in Tajikistan, say, or a retired shopkeeper in Australia—thought in the last thirty seconds before they drifted off to sleep, “thank God Mexico exists.” And if everyone in the world felt the same way, that would indicate total success. So, beyond and alongside the more practical proofs of improved trade, a higher national profile, and productive international engagements, our ultimate goal should be that somewhere between two people and seven billion people end up with good reasons to cherish Mexico.

I was rewarded with a faint but tolerant smile from Calderón, and the unspoken reply was as clear as if it had been spoken: “Let’s just get a few more Mexicans feeling glad that Mexico exists and we’ll be getting somewhere.”

But to me, this scenario was more than rhetoric or fantasy: it was a genuinely important outcome to aspire to, in tune with the scale and tone of what we were setting out to achieve. The destination—seven billion people thanking their lucky stars for Mexico—was farther away than the moon, but the important thing was to set the right direction.

For a year, I gritted my teeth and commuted monthly between London and Mexico City, conducting the project at a distance as I had done in Chile and a dozen other countries, partially anesthetized by a mixture of gin, exhaustion, and tonic. But I was also sustained by what was proving to be the most absorbing and challenging of all the projects I had so far encountered. Luckily, being there was thrilling enough to make up for getting there.

During this period, with the support of President Calderón and his cabinet, and a highly talented team of officials from the presidency and several other ministries and agencies, I developed a strategic approach and a total of 111 symbolic actions which Mexico could execute over the coming years.

At the end of the process, President Calderón’s team asked me to spend a further six or eight months with them, this time based full-time in Mexico with my wife and our youngest son, in order to see through the implementation of the projects.

On weekends, we took the time to explore the surrounding countryside. One memorable Saturday, we drove out toward Taxco but somehow took a wrong turn and found ourselves on a lonely desert road, many miles from the nearest human habitation, and very low on gasoline. On the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the road must surely lead somewhere, we continued to drive for another hour at what I imagined would be the most economical speed, until in the distance we finally saw a police patrol car stopped at the side of the road. Not another sign of life but our two cars was visible in any direction.

I pulled over at what I judged to be a respectful, utterly unthreatening distance behind the police car, got out and walked forward in what I hoped was a respectful, utterly unthreatening manner, taking care to show my hands but not too obviously, as I ran rapidly over in my mind several dozen scenarios from American movies in which a traveler on a lonely desert road is unjustly arrested and imprisoned, robbed, or simply executed by a rogue cop. On either side of the road, red broken rock stretched to the horizon, dotted with the occasional ragged cactus. It was intensely hot and windless. The empty road shimmered before me. Clusters of tangled brush lay by the roadside. It may have been tumbleweed. No movement came from the patrol car. Large birds wheeled high overhead in a perfectly cloudless sky. They may have been vultures.

My Spanish at this point mainly consisted of Spanish-sounding endings bolted onto Italian words, so my anxiety was intensified by the fact that I wasn’t at all sure I’d be able to make myself understood. My surprise and relief were considerable when the officer, who was from the now generously funded and enlarged Policía Federal, turned out to be most friendly and to speak rather good English. He looked at our fuel gauge, after courteously greeting my wife and son, and helped us to calculate that we probably had about 50 miles of range left, and that the nearest gas station was about 140 miles away. However, he said, there was a toll station about 50 miles farther down the road, where certain enterprising individuals would generally sell gasoline. He even offered to escort us there, but not wishing to waste police time, we thanked him with that unmistakable warmth that only comes from thanking somebody for not executing you, and headed off toward the tollbooth at an even more cautious pace than before.

Soon, we were coasting down a long hill toward a huge suspension bridge, with the engine switched off to save fuel, and had achieved a fine turn of speed which I hoped would get us at least halfway up the other side of the valley once we’d crossed the bridge, when I discovered something I didn’t previously know about the car we were driving: a minute or two after you switch off the engine, the steering and the brakes stop working, and the only way to get them working again is to restart the engine.

This was a concern. I now needed both hands to wrestle the steering wheel—suddenly as heavy and unresponsive as your own legs in one of those nightmares when you can’t run away fast enough from the ax murderer—around the increasingly twisting road as we hurtled faster and faster, in eerie silence, down toward the bridge which soared hundreds of feet over the rocky valley floor below. My wife, my son, and I were all yelling at each other at the top of our voices as the engine started after the fifth attempt, the brakes responded, and we finally crawled to an undignified halt in the middle of the road at the very edge of the bridge. We continued yelling for a surprisingly long time after the car had stopped. Silence reigned once again. The birds wheeled in the empty sky.

At this point we held a short family conference and agreed, with remarkably few mutual accusations of criminal incompetence, attempted homicide, inbred stupidity, or tearful vows to get on the very next plane back to London, that we’d probably saved enough fuel to get us to the toll station. And indeed, when we arrived there, a number of friendly individuals carrying plastic containers of various kinds offered us gasoline. My Spanish was just adequate to ask for reassurance that the liquid we were being offered was in fact gasoline and not Pepsi-Cola (it was a rather funny color and gently effervescent), and that there really was no alternative but to give the nice man quite a large wad of dollar bills, watch him trudge off toward a distant village, and hope to see him again soon. He did of course return twenty minutes later, helped me fill the tank, and gave me change. He charged us around double the normal pump price, which I thought was entirely reasonable given the added value of the service he was providing, and we left with many expressions of mutual regard and good wishes.

The episodes from our eventful trip to Taxco, and many others, looked so much like the Mexican scenarios we seemed to have learned from early childhood, rich with the prospect of fear and danger, and yet the ending of each real-life story was always more pleasant memories, rather than violence or tragedy, new friends instead of terrifying enemies, an increased faith in human nature rather than its loss.

Yet working every day with the Mexican government, I was acutely aware that the danger and violence and chaos were every bit as real and as full of meaning as my positive everyday encounters. Each morning’s newspapers brought fresh images of corpses hanging from road signs and freeway bridges, and every evening we went to bed with recollections of new and heart-warming encounters. The simple truth, of course, is that every country is many countries.

Some Mexicans tried to explain the contradiction to me by claiming that the media coverage was biased against the government—as some of it undoubtedly was—and, crucially, always failed to mention that the vast majority of the dead were from the cartels themselves, not innocent civilians, still less tourists. This was no doubt true. But the claim that only the bad guys were getting killed, and that the horrifying death tolls were therefore a good thing, was monstrously disingenuous. Part of the problem with organized crime and drug trafficking is that it swallows up good guys and makes them into bad guys. Most of the young men killed in drug-related violence were just somebody’s son who had ended up working in the only economically viable activity in town. Fix that, and you can start fixing the problem.

Several months after we relocated to Mexico City, a pleasant couple from the United States moved in to the apartment below ours, and as we sat together one day, enjoying the sight of a glittering emerald hummingbird fooling around in the brilliant mauve jacaranda just beyond our balcony, the husband admitted to me that one of the attractions of a “tour of duty” in Mexico was that Procter & Gamble, his employer, was paying him danger money. The area in which we were lucky enough to be living, Polanco, is more or less Mexico City’s equivalent of London’s Mayfair or LA’s Beverly Hills, and we agreed that the very idea of having to be bribed to live in such an exquisite neighborhood would have been comic if it hadn’t been so tragic.

The strategic direction which I recommended to the Mexican government took care to pay due regard to the strength and persistence of all this negative imagery. I concluded that the story of Mexico’s violence was now too well established for it to be advisable or feasible to ignore it, or to change the subject or sweep it under the carpet. My research confirmed that it clearly was, for the time being, many people’s primary association with the country and was consequently the only Mexico-related topic that they were prepared to pay any attention to.

Mexico, in short, had become defined by its problems, and in such situations, one has little choice but take the bull by the horns. Mexico needed to accept the stories that the world was telling about it and try to leverage their forward momentum, judo-style, in order to redirect their energy in a way that was fairer, truer, more productive, and more useful to the country’s aims and ambitions.

The nickname I gave to the strategy was “victim to leader,” or V2L for short. The V2L strategy proposed that, rather than continue to accept its role as a largely helpless victim of drug-related violence, Mexico should work hard and consistently to earn itself recognition as a leading international player in the fight against organized crime, narcotics, and corruption. Mexico’s task was to make itself a central and indispensable part of the global fight against drug trafficking, an acknowledged hub of world-beating expertise in this and in related areas of concern to people in other countries around the globe.

Almost everybody in the world knows somebody whose life has been affected by substance abuse or organized crime, and this formed a ready-made opportunity for Mexico to matter to hundreds of millions of people. By devoting its resources to tackling its own grave problems, in partnership with and for the shared benefit of other countries implicated in the same issues (and that’s pretty much every country on earth), Mexico had a marvelous opportunity to make a great many people—not just a lone teenager in Tajikistan—feel glad that it existed.

Focusing with courage and imagination on the international dimension of Mexico’s problems not only seemed the right thing to do both strategically and morally, but also generated the most productive, original, and wide-ranging discussions within government. Focusing too closely on local problems tended to produce quite narrow, quite predictable solutions; standing back and taking the global view always let more light into the conversation and always opened our minds to more inspiring solutions. These solutions usually needed some pretty drastic pruning afterward to convert them into feasible public policy, but something of their inherent originality and power would often remain in the final result.

All governments in the twenty-first century, it occurred to me, have two tasks: taking care of their citizens and participating in a bigger community of nations, toward which they also have duties and responsibilities. These tasks—which are also opportunities—cannot easily be separated or even ranked in importance. Indeed, placing a higher priority on one or the other of the tasks is not always a straightforward matter, because the destiny of one’s own citizens and of the citizens of other countries, the fate of one’s own nation and of other nations, the health and security of one’s own territory and of the whole planet, are so deeply entangled. In the same way, one can’t easily separate short-term interests and long-term interests, since these too are inextricably intertwined; to talk about selfish interests as distinct from collective interests is equally difficult.

If Mexico wanted to earn the respect and admiration of people in other countries, it had to do something for them as well as for its own citizens; but since its problems were also their problems, there was no contradiction in doing so.

Instead of only ever looking for opportunities, I began to see, countries should also try considering their obligations and responsibilities. This doesn’t have to be and perhaps shouldn’t be an explicitly ethical exercise, something that one does purely because it’s the “right thing to do”: much of the time, people’s hearts wouldn’t be in it. No, one does this because it produces better results.

This principle of treating domestic and international responsibilities as layers of the same challenges, of merging local problems and global solutions, of serving one’s own interests by serving the interests of others, applied to all of Mexico’s problems, since it shared them with so many other countries. In this respect, organized crime and narco-trafficking were no different from climate change or pollution, poverty, or inequality. Whatever Mexico did to help its own interests could be part and parcel of helping the interests of all humanity and thus earning the global esteem and admiration it desired, deserved, and needed in order to trade more effectively as a global player.

Among the symbolic actions I devised for the Mexican government was a plan for combining two existing projects: the Riviera Maya needed a new airport to relieve the pressure on Cancún, and the culture sector wanted a museum dedicated to the Mayan culture. Unfortunately the budget wasn’t available for both projects, and it rather looked as if the money would end up going to the airport. My suggestion was to combine the two into the world’s first Museopuerto—a hybrid airport-museum that would fulfill both functions simultaneously.

Every aspect of the typical airport experience was to be challenged by the architect, so that as far as physically possible its airport function was disguised, and it looked and felt like a wonderful world-class modern museum that just happened to have a runway out the back. And it was to be a real, important world-class museum of the Mayan civilization, with the usual complement of temporary and permanent exhibitions, educational, and recreational facilities, strong academic and curatorial credentials, and major collections of art and artifacts. It would have a gift shop, but as well as selling designer handbags, paperbacks, hand sanitizer, and inflatable neck cushions, this would be an award-winning museum shop, selling unique handicrafts and reproductions that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the world.

Many people, perhaps the majority, would visit the Museopuerto simply as a museum; some would arrive at the museum by land, and some by air, because after all it would be the only museum in the world directly served by international and domestic airlines, with its own runway and control tower. Many visitors to the region would arrive by plane and spend an hour or two in the museum before they set off on their tour or vacation, using the exhibits and guided commentaries in the Museopuerto to prepare themselves for their visit to the region: because everybody knows that the success of cultural tourism experiences depends very much on the degree of preparation that visitors achieve before they arrive. The Museopuerto would thus be the educational gateway to the Mayan world and could become the first of several gateways to the various regions of Mexico in the future.

When Mexico hosted the sixteenth Climate Change Summit in Cancún, I wrote an opening speech for President Calderón which I hoped would set the scene for Mexico’s “gift to the world.” The speech started with these words: “Let us, first of all, be quite clear about why we are here in Cancún. We are not negotiating for our own interests as wealthier countries. Nor are we negotiating on behalf of the interests of developing countries. We are negotiating on behalf of our children. So, let us remember that when we strive to be good and effective negotiators, we should above all strive to be good ancestors.”

And soon after Cancún, I was asked to write Calderón’s speech for the Stanford University commencement ceremony. I have no pretensions of being a speechwriter, but this seemed like a good opportunity, so I wrote about having faith in “sweat and silver bullets”—how magical solutions to the world’s most intractable problems, such as climate change and organized crime, really can exist if supported by hard work, and how pursuing them in true partnership with other countries can really help to fix the mess we’re in.

I wrote into the speech a declaration that Mexico was committed to this aim, and wondered if people would notice that here was a national leader at last speaking the language of international responsibility, hoping that if they did, this would encourage others to look to Calderón as something more than just a clever and capable president of Mexico. This, in turn, would help enormously to deliver the recognition that Mexico desired—because there is no doubt that a charismatic head of state or head of government showing real leadership on the international stage can make a bigger and faster difference to their country’s global profile than almost anything else.

Onstage at Stanford, however, Calderón delivered a different speech, a more conventional presidential address showcasing his country, its assets, and achievements, and emphasizing its success in tackling its own problems. Climate change did feature prominently in the speech, unsurprisingly, given that it was a personal passion of Calderón’s and a subject in which he possessed significant expertise. And yet, although the speech was delivered to the graduating students at Stanford and, via the media, to the world, his words seemed to be addressed more to the voters and the media back home in Mexico, reminding them of his administration’s achievements during its term in office. There was nothing about telling the world what he and Mexico wanted to do for them. The speech was well delivered and well received, but I was disappointed.

I suppose it was naive to hope that a politician would choose to tell the world’s citizens (who after all couldn’t vote for him) what he was going to do for them, rather than tell his own people (to whom he owed his position, and whose interests he was legally compelled to serve) what he had already done for them. I suppose this was the first time I’d really got the measure of how comprehensively the national interest would trounce the international interest in the hands of elected politicians.

It’s not their fault and I can’t find it in my heart to blame them: Felipe Calderón in particular, through his dedication to the cause of climate change, was a leader who did more than most to work for the world outside his borders. But the default mode of all our leaders is, as I put it in my 2014 TED talk, “minds that microscope, not minds that telescope.”⁸ It’s one of the natural consequences of the democratic systems we have evolved.

I refuse to believe that it invariably has to be so, and history confirms this through the steady trickle of leaders whose instinctive perspective is both global and local: men and women who manage to frame their tasks and solutions in a way that’s relevant and inspiring to people beyond their own borders, whose deeds and words are for all humanity, and who often acquire a very special respect at home precisely because of the respect they garner abroad.

My final suggestion for the Mexican government was deliberately designed to be globally modest—a bilateral symbolic action, indeed, rather than anything multilateral—yet unashamedly ambitious in terms of its time span, its goals, and the political challenges it would present.

It was nothing less than a total reset of the relationship between the United States and Mexico, the elephant sitting quietly in the corner of the room in every meeting I had attended during the previous two years.

In 1963, when I was two years old, President Charles de Gaulle and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer sat down to discuss the animosity between the French and German peoples which had divided Europe for centuries, and which had recently formed the fault line in two world wars, the most destructive conflicts in the history of humankind.

They also looked forward to the European Project, yet instead of asking, as everyone before them had asked, how they could accommodate this ancient rivalry, they had the courage and the imagination instead to ask how it could be finally ended.

The result of that historic conversation was the Elysée Treaty, which decreed a comprehensive raft of political, cultural, social, economic, and military cooperation and rapprochement between France and Germany. It grew into the most ambitious program of bilateral public and private diplomacy ever attempted, grafting together the destinies of the two nations at every level, from cabinet ministers to schoolchildren, from foreign and defense policy to scientific research. Every imaginable form of exchange, cooperation, and mutual engagement was included and diligently carried out for decades afterward.

And it worked. Fifty years later, as I looked at the data in the Nation Brands Index, I could clearly trace the legacy of that extraordinary pact: on many questions, the French and the Germans place each other first in their list of preferences. It was a far cry from what I saw elsewhere in the survey: in 2010, for example, the Mexicans had only ranked the United States twenty-second out of the fifty countries in the study, and the Americans had ranked Mexico fortieth.

It was then and still is my belief that the ancient and deeply rooted misunderstanding and enmity between the people of Mexico and the United States, although so different in cause, character, and consequences from the differences between France and Germany half a century earlier, is equally threatening to the future security and prosperity of these two countries and to their wider neighborhood. Trade, security, immigration, diplomacy, science, industry, finance, energy, the environment, tourism, and cultural and educational relations between these two powers can never achieve their full potential unless they do what de Gaulle and Adenauer did in 1963. The governments of Mexico and the United States, instead of politely avoiding any mention of this enmity as they were still doing in 2010, should commit themselves to sitting down together and resolving it once and for all.

And if this sounded ambitious, it certainly was. But I felt that we possessed the advantage and the comfort of knowing that it was not impossible, because it had been done before. We even knew, thanks to de Gaulle and Adenauer, what the precise ingredients of success were. None of it was magic or even expensive compared to the gigantic costs of the mutual mistrust between the two populations: just a wise, simple, and humanistic vision, pursued through a rich and ambitious program of simple engagements in every sector.

Mexico and the United States needed then, and still need today, an Elíseo Treaty, so that a child born today might live to see a North America as peaceful, united, and prosperous as the Europe I could still enjoy at the time I wrote the plan.

All it needs is two leaders with the vision, the faith, the humanity, and the determination to make this their defining legacy: a plan to make the Mexicans and the Americans friends forever. It really seemed as if Obama and Calderón might have been those two leaders, but election fever had already set in by the time my project in Mexico was nearing its end, and the chances of anything new—especially something ambitious and international in scope—gaining sufficient resources and attention to get it off the ground were slight indeed.

It’s sad to recollect these discussions in a period when the relationship between Mexico and the United States has gone backward in ways and to an extent which would have seemed barely credible in 2010. As I write, glancing at the most recent edition of the Nation Brands Index, I see to my sorrow that Mexicans now rank their northern neighbor dead last—in fiftieth place, below every rogue nation in the list—for governance.

To my mind, these new conditions don’t make an Elíseo Treaty less likely, just more necessary, as soon as there are, once again, leaders in both countries with the courage and wisdom to see how vastly greater are the benefits of cooperation and collaboration than yet more competition.