Trump Wins a Round in Quest To Regain Panama Canal

The best way to look at the latest contretemps over the Panama Canal is to see it as a step in President Trump’s vow to wrest back control of the waterway. It was triggered by a decision of Panama’s supreme court voiding the contract of a Hong Kong company, CK Hutchison, to run some of the canal’s ports. CNBC headlines it as a “major victory” for Mr. Trump and reports that the Chinese communists threaten “political and economic consequences.”It is the latest glimpse of the folly of President Carter’s decision to give the canal to Panama in the first place. The last time we wrote about it here was in December 2024 in an editorial called “A Man, a Plan, a Canal — Trump.” The president-elect was about to return to Washington for his second term amid a drive by the Chinese to maneuver against the Monroe Doctrine. Mr. Trump calls the canal a “vital national asset” that could land in the “wrong hands.”Such understatement is rarely part of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric. The Central American nation’s high court had found the Hong Kong-based company’s concession to run Panamanian ports was “unconstitutional.” The pact, the Panamanian Supreme Court added, reflected “a disproportionate bias in favor of the company” that lacked “any justification.” The tribunal concluded that the deal with CK Hutchison was to the “detriment” of Panama’s treasury.The response by Communist China suggests that Mr. Trump has struck a nerve by warning of Beijing’s designs on Panama and its American-built canal. The Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of China’s State Council called the ruling “utterly ridiculous.” China threatened, too, that Panama, “if they persist in their own way and remain obstinate,” would “inevitably pay a heavy price in terms of politics and economics.” President Monroe, call your office.The language from the menacing mandarins at Beijing suggests the kind of foreign meddling in the Western Hemisphere that the fifth president’s doctrine was designed to prevent. Mr. Trump calls his renewed emphasis on preserving America’s sway in its own proverbial backyard as the “Donroe Doctrine.” That is a long-overdue corrective after years in which a strategic rival like China has been quietly building up its influence in Latin America.The escalating imbroglio over the canal underscores Carter’s error some 50 years ago in ceding the waterway. Carter, per Mr. Trump, “foolishly gave it away.” When the canal opened in 1914, a Sun editorial touted it as “the most stupendous engineering operation ever undertaken by nation or man.” The waterway was “the greatest victory of peace recorded in any volume of history,” the Sun added, “and it has been won by the Army of the United States.” All the more perplexing, then, that Carter, abetted by Democrats in Congress, would surrender this triumph of American ingenuity. The giveaway was of a piece with Carter’s vision of an America gripped by malaise. One leader who spoke up in opposition was Ronald Reagan, who in 1977 warned that the canal’s cession would “create a power vacuum in the Caribbean” that could be exploited by “Fidel Castro and his patron, the Soviet Union.”Reagan asked, too, of the Canal’s loss: “What does this say to our allies around the world about our leadership intentions, our international role, about our own view of our national defense capability?” That kind of talk doubtless helped propel Reagan to the White House and to victory in the Cold War. In 1914 the Sun summed it up: “It is an American canal, forever to be wholly under the control of the United States, alike in peace and war.”

Trump Wins a Round in Quest To Regain Panama Canal

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