The Washington Post: Trump’s Panama Canal threats designed to scuttle China influence

President-elect Donald Trump’s threat last weekend to reclaim the Panama Canal was designed to make clear that “decades of US commerce financing China’s growth and strategic footprint in the Americas is over,” according to a senior Trump appointee.

Successive administrations have allowed a “vacuum of control and influence” in the Western Hemisphere, Mauricio Claver-Carone, named by Trump as his incoming administration’s special envoy for Latin America, said Monday.

But those earlier administrations also included Trump’s first term, when his policy in the hemisphere focused primarily on migration and sanctions against Venezuela, even as Panama severed diplomatic relations with Taiwan and established ties with China in 2017.

That opened the door to Chinese investments and companies that were already winning bids for major infrastructure projects elsewhere in the region.

Trump’s recent comments may reflect a newly muscular interpretation of his America First policy amid rising alarm about what the commander of US forces in the region this year called China’s significant presence on America’s “20-yard-line.”

At the same time, the incoming administration may see Latin America as an easier place to exert foreign policy pressure - or at least the image of toughness - than some other parts of the world.

Following declarations that the canal is a “vital” US “national asset,” Trump made a similar claim Sunday regarding another part of the hemisphere. In a social media post, he said that U.S. “ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” for American national security and for “Freedom throughout the World.”

Neither claim was new. Trump in 2019 first proposed purchasing Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, which refused the offer.

Last year, in an interview with Tucker Carlson on X, the Elon Musk-owned social media site, Trump inaccurately said that China “controls” and runs the Panama Canal.

“If I’m president, they’ll get out, because I had a very good relationship with Xi,” Trump said in the August 2023 interview, referring to Chinese President Xi Jinping. “He respected this country. He respected me, and he’ll get out. We can’t let them run the Panama Canal. We built the Panama Canal. Should have never been given to Panama.”

Trump has long been an admirer of the Monroe Doctrine, the early 19th-century warning to European powers that the United States would forcibly resist European colonialism and interference in the Western Hemisphere.

Later administrations disclaimed the policy as America’s own justification for a history of US interventions across the region. But the doctrine is “the formal policy of our country,” Trump said in a 2018 address to the United Nations.

Both Panama and China rejected Trump’s most recent threat. In a televised address to the nation Sunday, Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino said that “every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zone belongs to Panama and will remain so.”

Holding up a red leather-bound copy of the 1977 Panama Canal treaties, Mulino said that “the sovereignty and independence of our country are not negotiable.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning, referring to Mulino’s statement, said that there is “no control, direct or indirect, from any power” over the canal. “China will as always respect Panama’s sovereignty over the canal and recognize the canal as a permanently neutral international waterway,” Mao said in Beijing.

Wang Youming, of the China Institute of International Studies in Beijing, had a different take on Trump’s rationale.

“Trump’s ultimate goal seems to be negotiating better port fees for American ships with the Panamanian government; this is just a bargaining tactic,” he said, according to the Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid published in English.

More than half of the ship traffic through the Panama Canal is to or from U.S. ports, avoiding the long trip around Cape Horn at the southern end of South America.

Passage fees can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars for the largest commercial and passenger cruise vessels. Since 2017, Chinese companies have won bids for a number of major infrastructure projects, from power plants and a railroad to expanded locks and other canal improvements.

In 2018, Xi made a state visit to Panama, after Panama signed onto its Belt and Road initiative.

“Our navy and commerce have been treated in a very unfair and injudicious way,” Trump said in a weekend social media post. “The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, especially knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama by the U.S.”

Prices, which are set by an independent Panamanian commission, have increased recently for all transits, first because of a drought that lowered water levels and caused a reduction in the number of ships that could pass through and this year under a new booking system that imposes fines for ships that do not arrive for passage within a set time frame.

“The tariffs are not set on a whim,” Mulino said. Panama has been widely praised for its management of the canal since the turnover from U.S. ownership was completed nearly a quarter century ago.

Any US attempt to take over the waterway would probably face massive legal and international opposition.

While there is little evidence China has sought a military presence in the Americas, the Southern Command has raised flags about Chinese investment in critical infrastructure, including deepwater ports, and cyber and space facilities that “can have a potential dual use for malign commercial and military activities.”

Many years of US warnings about the risks of debt and dependence on China largely have gone unheeded as Latin American countries have found Beijing a more willing and less demanding economic partner than the United States.

Panama became a country in 1903 after breaking away from Colombia with the assistance of the United States under the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, who had long envisioned constructing a canal across the narrow isthmus separating South and Central America.

The waterway was built by U.S. engineers largely using labor recruited from Caribbean islands. Although Trump told Carlson that 35,000 Americans had died of mosquito-borne illnesses during construction - and put the figure at 38,000 last weekend - various scholars and official records have cited about 5,600 total deaths during the period of U.S. construction, most of them foreign laborers.

The original U.S.-Panama treaty gave the United States rights in perpetuity to both the canal itself and a zone consisting of five miles on either side of the center of the waterway.

The zone was almost entirely populated by Americans, primarily service members and their families at a U.S. military base there.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as colonialism increasingly was rejected and the United States competed with the Soviet Union for the moral high ground in what was then called the Third World, anti-U.S. demonstrations roiled Panamanian cities. The administration of President Richard M. Nixon began negotiations with the Panamanian dictatorship of Omar Torrijos to relinquish both the canal and the zone.

In debating agreements eventually reached between Torrijos and President Jimmy Carter, opponents in the U.S. Senate demanded a second treaty in addition to the one agreeing to turn over the canal by 2000.

Under the separate Permanent Neutrality Treaty, the United States and Panama agreed that the waterway would remain “permanently neutral” under Panamanian ownership, with no discrimination toward any country regarding tolls or access.

A key amendment, insisted upon by U.S. critics of the agreement before ratification in 1977 and cited by some ongoing critics of the treaties, states that if any canal operations are “interfered with,” the United States and Panama “each independently” have the right to take steps to restore its operations, “including the use of military force in the Republic of Panama.”

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