Donald Trump meant what he said during the campaign about trying to keeping American jobs in America.

As the opening salvo in his “Make America Great Again” playbook, the tweeter-in-chief has been shaming American companies that offshore high-paying American jobs to factories in other countries, with some apparent minor successes that will do more to burnish Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker than they will to help working Americans struggling to make ends meet.

On Tuesday, Ford Motor Co. F, -0.28% announced a reversal of its plan to invest $1.6 billion in a factory in Mexico to build small cars, and said it would invest a lesser amount in a factory in Michigan to build electric vehicles. That news came just hours after Trump slammed General Motors Co. GM, +0.66% for importing compact cars into the U.S. from its Mexican production facility.

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On the surface, it looks as if Trump’s bullying tactics are working, even before he takes the oath of office and makes good on his threat to impose hefty tariffs or taxes on any imported products manufactured in those offshored factories.

First, United Technologies Corp.’s US:UTX Carrier heating and cooling unit backed off from a plan to offshore a few hundred jobs from an Indiana plant to Mexico, and now Ford is doing the same thing. But we never hear about the thousands of jobs that are lost quietly. Or the thousands of new hires that don’t make the evening news.

Also read: Ford’s Mexico shift shows Trump’s bully pulpit has some value

Trump has been focusing his ire almost exclusively on American companies that are moving production to Mexico as he prepares to make good on his promise to tear up and renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico.

But, as with a few other corporate announcements that Trump has touted as endorsements of his plans to rewrite the rules of global trade, there was less than met the eye in the Ford announcement. Yes, Ford CEO Mark Fields flattered Trump in his statement, but it’s clear that Ford made the decision to cancel the new Mexican factory for one reason only: It no longer made economic sense.

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The Ford announcement reveals the hidden danger of Trump’s bullying tactics: Corporations may be eager to give Trump some credit for decisions they’d make anyway, which will bolster Trump’s confidence that there’s nothing wrong with American manufacturing that can’t be solved by getting tough. Tear up the treaties, impose some tariffs, bully some CEOs, and — voila! — America is back!

The reality is more complex, of course. American companies (and European, and Japanese and Chinese companies as well) aren’t putting some of their production in Mexico just to take advantage of a poorly negotiated NAFTA. They are investing in Mexico because it’s a great place to do business. And Trump can’t change that reality with a tweet or a tariff.

German, Japanese and Korean auto makers are expanding their production in Mexico not to take advantage of any claimed unfair rules under NAFTA, but because Mexico is a good place to build cars. For starters, labor costs are much cheaper in Mexico ($8.24 an hour vs. $46.35 in the U.S. and Canada). The manufacturing supply chains are robust. The Mexican peso USDMXN, +0.45% is weak, giving its manufacturers another advantage.

But perhaps the biggest advantage Mexico has is something Donald Trump doesn’t want to talk about: Mexico has free-trade agreements with more countries than anyone else. Those treaties mean that, if you want to export cars to North America, to South America, or even to Europe, it makes sense to build them in Mexico.

Read more from the Center for Automotive Research about Mexico’s auto industry.

Trump thinks he can bully Ford and GM into abandoning Mexico, and maybe he can, sometimes.

But the economics of manufacturing in Mexico (and in many other low-cost regions around the world) are too compelling for any multinational corporation to ignore. Trump can probably make it prohibitively expensive to import anything into the United States, but that wouldn’t reverse Mexico’s advantages in producing for a global market, especially if our trading partners retaliate with tariffs or otherwise restrict U.S. exports.

Trump thinks he can reverse centuries of globalization with a tweet or two. He thinks he can restore America’s glory by building tariff walls against the world. But Trump cannot repeal the laws of economics that give multinational corporations every incentive to cut their costs any way they can.

U.S. factories assembled more than 12 million vehicles in the past year, not far from the peaks set in 1979 and in 2000.

You never heard Trump say it on the campaign trail, but Ford, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler FCAU, -1.24% , Toyota TM, and the rest still build cars in America because it’s the smart thing to do. We have competitive advantages too.

American workers need a president who knows America’s strengths as well as its weaknesses.