PANAMA CITY, Panama—When President Theodore Roosevelt formulated plans for the Panama Canal, there was no Panama. The country was still part of the Republic of Colombia despite bouts of on-again, off-again autonomy and separatism.
When Colombia rejected proposals for the canal, Roosevelt threw U.S. support to Panamanian independence or, as Panamanians refer to it, separation from Colombia. It was an implicit quid pro quo. Panama received independence, and the United States was able to build the canal after the Spaniards gave up on the prospect, and the French failed in their efforts.
It took 11 years, but on the first day of World War I, the canal opened under American control. The U.S. invested over $375 million to build the canal and agreed to pay annual royalties, albeit a paltry $250,000 if not adjusted for inflation. The U.S., meanwhile, controlled a roughly 10-mile zone centered on the canal’s center line but excluding both Panama City and Colon, the country’s two largest cities and, respectively, the Pacific and Caribbean termini. While Panama remained a close ally and the U.S. was responsible for Panama’s separation from Colombia and full independence, the U.S. colonial presence was a consistent irritant to Panamanians. A return of the Canal Zone to Panamanian sovereignty was a consistent Panamanian demand across decades.
That said, President Jimmy Carter’s return of the canal was both unpopular in the U.S. and strategically obtuse. At the height of the Cold War, Soviet interests posed a danger. During the 1980s, it was drug cartels, leading to the 1989 U.S. invasion, an episode that remains popular in Panama today, given the nature of Manuel Noriega’s dictatorship. Today, the problem is the People’s Republic of China, which has made strategic inroads into Panama and, for that matter, much of Latin America and the Caribbean. Decades of neglectful U.S. diplomacy have consequences.
Trump may want to turn back the clock on half a century of incompetent negotiation and poor deal-making, but legally, he has no grounds. Unlike the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was a political agreement, the Panama Canal Treaty was a Senate-ratified, bipartisan treaty. To walk away from that treaty would set a precedent that could void every other U.S. treaty, including those that benefit the U.S. and its people.
Putting legalisms aside, there is another problem that Trump’s cheerleaders ignore: The canal that Carter surrendered is not the same canal that exists today. The original cut remains to accommodate smaller ships, but in the 45-plus years since Carter handed back the canal, the size of the container ships upon which world trade depends has grown significantly, far beyond the dimensions of the original canal.
In 2007, the Panama Canal Authority began a major expansion to cut a third channel and set of locks and double the total capacity of the canal by allowing it to accommodate the world’s largest ships, some almost as large as the Empire State Building is high. After almost a decade and a $5.2 billion investment, the new, expanded channel opened in 2016.
Herein lies the problem. While the U.S. paid for the first canal, the financing and investment for the second was far broader: not only Panama itself, but also the Japanese, European Union, Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, Inter-American Development Bank, and World Bank. Accordingly, grabbing the Panama Canal would no longer be righting Carter’s wrong, itself degrading the value of any U.S. treaty, but would be an act of naked imperialism.
HEGSETH STRESSES US CANNOT BE ‘ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL’ IN PROTECTING PANAMA CANAL
While Trump talks about purchasing Greenland, this would not be a purchase: It would be an imperial land grab that would justify by precedent Russian President Vladimir Putin marching into Poland, Finland, the Baltics, Moldova, and Kazakhstan, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan marching through Syria to try to seize Jerusalem, or Chinese dictator Xi Jinping invading Taiwan or northern India.
Put another way, seizing the canal would be the 21st-century equivalent of an assassin’s bullet striking Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Its reverberations would ultimately cost the lives of far more than the 116,000 Americans killed in World War I.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.