Expansion of Regional Organization’s Function: Case of NAFTA

September 11 event in 2001 and its consequences made terrorism and counterterrorism, the first priority of US foreign policy in world order and regional organizations such as NAFTA. So, the main question of this article is how did US persuade other members of NAFTA to pursue and accompany US plans in its fight against terrorism? To answer this question, authors used “cognition theory” to justify functional expansion of NAFTA from economic issues to security ones.
The results indicate that as a hegemon, US tried to create various motivations to persuade other countries to join this fight. To do this, US used two intellectual basis including “trade-security dependency” and “human security”.