President-elect Donald Trump has made some eyebrow-raising statements about the Panama Canal and its ownership. These are matters that no one has talked much about for almost fifty years.
Trump recently stated that the USA should negotiate a new treaty for its use of the Panama Canal. And of course, Trump had a scapegoat for the current “bad deal”. Former President Jimmy Carter, according to Trump, “foolishly gave away” the canal back in the 1970s.
(Note: The president-elect took this jab before Jimmy Carter’s recent passing.)
This has led to speculation on social media that the USA might be invading Panama sometime next year.
Don’t worry: that is unlikely to happen.
What’s the story behind the Panama Canal?
The Panama Canal is an extremely valuable piece of real estate because it permits sea passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Panama. This obviates the need for a longer, more hazardous trip around the southern tip of South America.
The United States constructed the Panama Canal from 1904 to 1914, and administered the canal for decades after. No one thought too much about this arrangement in the pre-Cold War era. That was just the way things were done: the industrial north ran things for the developing south, with varying degrees of equity and heavy-handedness.
Yes, such arrangements are now called imperialism. But there was a time when many people (in the industrial north, anyway) saw imperialism as a win-win proposition, or at least a necessary evil.
By the middle of the 20th-century, though, imperialism had acquired a bad name. Nothing bolstered Soviet claims of Western imperialism like…unapologetic Western imperialism.
Plus, the war-ravaged countries of Europe could no longer afford their overseas empires. France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom were giving up their colonial possessions in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In such an environment, it was no longer copacetic for the United States to maintain control over the Panama Canal, a revenue-generating asset located on another country’s territory.
Did Jimmy Carter “give away” the Panama Canal?
Negotiations for the transfer of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government began in 1974, under a Republican administration. Nevertheless, Democrat Jimmy Carter signed the resultant Torrijos–Carter Treaty in 1977, which began the official transfer process.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, this led to widespread charges that Jimmy Carter had “given back” or “given away” the Panama Canal. This wasn’t entirely accurate, but nor was it entirely inaccurate. Jimmy Carter didn’t simply wake up one morning and say, “Hey, I think I’ll give the Panama Canal back to Panama today!” The wheels were already set in motion. Carter, though, was the president who signed off on the transfer.
The narrative that “Carter gave away the Panama Canal” was part of a larger narrative: that Jimmy Carter was a weak and ineffectual president.
This was the same Jimmy Carter who tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to free the American hostages in Iran by force (Operation Eagle Claw, 1980). This was also the same Jimmy Carter who formulated what has come to be known as the Carter Doctrine. Promulgated in the wake of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Carter Doctrine declared that the USA would use military force, if necessary, to defend its legitimate interests in the Persian Gulf.
Nevertheless, I remember the narrative, and I was a kid at the time. Donald Trump, who was by then entering early middle age, remembers it, too. In 1977, not all Americans agreed with the transfer of the Panama Canal to an arguably unserious country like Panama.
(And maybe there was something to that. Let’s not forget that the US had to invade Panama in 1989 to oust its dictatorial, drug-dealing leader, Manuel Noriega.)
We can be reasonably certain that back in 1977, Trump was not on-board with Carter’s decision. Hence the recent statements from the president-elect.
What will Trump “do” about the Panama Canal, if anything?
Trump so far hasn’t challenged Panama’s basic ownership rights of the canal. He claims that he wants to see the US given fairer terms for the usage of a canal it built and paid for.
According to Trump, “it [the canal] was given to Panama and to the people of Panama, but it has provisions. You got to treat us fairly and they haven’t treated us fairly.”
In other words, these veiled statements about the Panama Canal are a negotiating tactic, as are (probably) Trump’s threats to impose new tariffs on all goods originating in a slew of countries, from China to Canada.
“Big stick diplomacy”, or boorish bluster?
I won’t lie to the reader. I’m a 20th-century man. There is a part of me that longs for the sober, measured communications of 20th-century presidents like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. But our Democratic alternative in 2024 was a long way from that 20th-century benchmark, too. This is simply the Brave New World in which we’re living.
Here’s another interpretation. President-elect Trump has expressed admiration for Teddy Roosevelt, who articulated “big stick diplomacy”. TR famously said, “speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far”. Donald Trump does not always speak softly, of course. But neither did Teddy Roosevelt, by hypersensitive 21st-century standards.
Over the next four years, it will be necessary for us (and the rest of the world) to discern the US president’s real intentions from his opening statements, which will often be mere negotiating positions.
I can put one such position to rest…sort of.
We are not going to invade Panama (again, as we already invaded it in 1989) anytime in the foreseeable future. But the powers-that-be in Panama City have been officially put on notice. Changes are coming to the conditions by which the US and its shippers utilize the Panama Canal.
-ET