The hostage framing is accurate and it is not just OEMs feeling it. We spent two years restructuring our supply agreements specifically to hit USMCA regional value content thresholds. Audits, certifications, origin documentation that took a full-time person to maintain. We did everything right by the rules as written. What nobody told us is that the rules as written could be selectively enforced or reinterpreted based on what outcome someone in Washington wanted on a given week. The compliance work is not worthless but the assumption that compliance would provide predictability turned out to be wrong. That is the part that is genuinely hard to explain to our board when they ask why we went through all of it.

USMCA compliance was structured as a binary. OEMs and their suppliers built production footprints on the assumption that meeting those thresholds would translate into a defined and stable tariff treatment. The current uncertainty is not about whether companies are compliant. Most major OEMs are. It is about whether compliance will be respected as the policy framework shifts underneath it.