Panama, Redux: Roosevelt Dug It, Trump Wants It Back

Few modern presidents have made foreign policy so theatrical or so transactional as the 47th U.S. President Donald Trump. From flirtations with autocrats to outlandish territorial gambits, his diplomacy has often resembled a business pitch rather than any strategic doctrine. In this series, we track the shadow of Trumpism abroad - from Beijing to the Baltics, Gaza to Greenland as Trump, in his second coming, is leaving behind not just disruption, but a trail of broken alliances, bruised institutions and a deepening mistrust of America’s word.

PART - 2

Once a symbol of American might, the Panama Canal now draws the gaze of a president who governs like a vaudevillian imperialist.

Since returning to the White House in January, Donald Trump has made a habit of declaring that the United States should “take back” the Panama Canal, as if American dominion over this keenly contested strip of Central America were not a relic of 20th-century imperial swagger but an unfinished item on his second-term agenda.

With each repetition, Trump resuscitates a long-buried fantasy that a concrete trench carved through the tropics remains, by right or by force, the property of the United States.

But then, the Panama Canal was never just a ditch. It was, and has always remained, the symbolic front line of U.S. hemispheric dominance. When Ferdinand de Lesseps (of the Suez Canal fame) convened the Congrès International d’Études du Canal Interocéanique in Paris in 1879 to dream aloud about carving a path through Central America, the atmosphere was one of scientific grandeur and soft colonial ambition. As David Mccullough describes vividly in his narrative classic ‘The Path Between the Seas’ (1977) which deals extensively with politics around the building of the Canal, “136 delegates from 22 countries filed through oak doors of the Société de Géographie in Paris’ Latin Quarter to inaugurate ‘La grande entreprise.’ Among them were admirals, engineers, economists and, in one case, a Mexican delegate who had left his baggage at customs, picked up a top hat and gloves from a nearby shop, and made his grand entrance freshly shaved.” Such was the ceremony surrounding a project that promised to reroute the world.

The canal that eventually came into being decades later - not under the French but American aegis - was a monument to ambition and arrogance. For the swaggering Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. President, the construction of the Canal was the most important action that he took in foreign affairs. He had used what he called “the big stick” to pry Panama from Colombia in 1903, just months after declaring that ‘civilized nations’ had a duty to impose order on ‘backward’ ones. That Roosevelt was then only 42 years old, and already the youngest president in U.S. history, added to the swashbuckling mythos.

Today, more than a century later, another American president, equally theatrical but far less historically literate, wants it back. Trump’s ‘logic’ follows an old playbook dressed in gold lamé: revive American supremacy through theatrical grievance.

To be fair, Trump is not the first to cast longing glances at the isthmus. Every U.S. president since Teddy Roosevelt has struggled with the contradictions of American imperialism. Eisenhower reduced American dependence on the canal after Suez made it clear that colonial pretensions had a shelf life. Kennedy tried to soothe Panamanian frustrations after deadly riots in 1964, but also deployed troops when the zone was threatened. Carter, famously, signed away American control - a move so controversial that it nearly derailed his re-election. Reagan rode a wave of populist outrage, declaring that he’d never give it up. And in 1989, George H.W. Bush sent 27,000 troops to depose General Manuel Noriega, in what the Pentagon called ‘Operation Just Cause’ while locals described it as ‘gringo overkill.’

If there is a unifying theme here, it is that the canal remains a Rorschach blot of American anxieties about decline, disorder and foreign intrusion.

Ronald Reagan, during his 1976 and 1980 campaigns, deployed the Panama Canal as a symbol of declining American power. He lambasted the Carter-Torrijos Treaties, which had set the path for Panama to assume full control of the Canal by 1999. Yet, Reagan’s posture was paradoxically grounded in legal ambiguity.

Still, Reagan operated within the realm of diplomacy and historical nods. His claim, while jingoistic, acknowledged a 20th-century imperial inheritance of the Roosevelt era, tapping nostalgia rather than proposing aggressive rupture.

Trump, by contrast, obliterated nuance. His worldview, forged in the language of deals, sees the Canal not as a shared infrastructure built through painful colonial entanglements but as a pawn in global deal-making.

While Reagan at least had Arnulfo Arias, the colourful exiled Panamanian strongman, whispering ghostly justifications into his ear, Trump, as is his wont, relies more on gut and grievance.

The facts, of course, are less cinematic. As historian Walter LaFeber observes in ‘The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective’ (1978), possibly the best study on the politics surrounding the Canal, the U.S. never owned the Canal outright; it controlled the Zone under a treaty with Colombia (and later Panama), but maintained only sovereign rights and not sovereignty. However, Reagan glossed over this, wrapping historical complexity in populist patriotism.

What makes Trump’s interest in the canal more than just nostalgia is its timing. Today, the 50-mile waterway is in crisis. A prolonged drought, likely exacerbated by climate change and El Niño, has forced the Panama Canal Authority to limit the number and weight of ships transiting the lock system. Daily transits have dropped from 36 to as low as 24. Ships wait for days, sometimes weeks, to enter, costing billions in lost cargo value. Maersk and other shipping giants are rerouting through the Suez or around the Cape. So much for the dream of a seamless maritime highway.

Overlaying this natural crisis is a geopolitical one. Chinese state-backed firms have poured billions into expanding port facilities on either end of the isthmus, constructing logistics hubs, and winning infrastructure tenders. COSCO, the Chinese shipping giant, now dominates much of the commercial flow through the canal. To Trump and his strategists, this is tantamount to ‘encroachment.’ (The Panama Canal is administered by an autonomous Panamanian agency since 1999, as per the Torrijos–Carter Treaties)

Yet facts rarely deter Trump. The notion that Panama is ripe for re-Americanisation fits neatly into his worldview that America can - and should - retrieve what it foolishly gave away.

Panamanians, for their part, are not amused. The Panamanian public, while divided on Chinese influence, is broadly supportive of national control. After all, the canal’s transfer in 1999 was a moment of post-colonial pride. Trump’s posturing revives unpleasant memories of Yankee arrogance.

To understand just how incongruous Trump’s vision is, consider the original folly. When the French launched their effort in 1881, led by de Lesseps, they underestimated not just the engineering challenge but the geography, climate and politics of the region. The ensuing disaster in form of the infamous Panama Scandal brought down banks, wrecked reputations and eventually triggered the Dreyfus Affair in France.

By the time the Americans stepped in, they too had to learn hard lessons. Congress initially saw the canal purely as an engineering challenge and refused to include physicians or sanitation experts in the planning. The result was thousands of deaths from yellow fever and malaria before Colonel William Gorgas introduced basic hygiene measures. The canal was not built on hubris alone, but it certainly required a vast reservoir of it.

So, what is Trump’s endgame? Beyond the applause lines, there is little evidence of a concrete strategy except the vague suggestion that “something needs to be done.” But the very vagueness is the point. The canal is not a policy to Trump but a metaphor for lost greatness, for ‘global betrayal,’ for an America that used to take what it wanted and didn’t apologise.

In that sense, the Panama Canal has come full circle. Once envisioned as a universal project “in the impartial serenity of science” (as the 1879 delegates put it), it has again become a mirror of national ambition and myth-making. Only now, the ambitions are shriller and the myths, more threadbare.

From Balboa’s first glint of the Pacific in 1513 to Trump’s bluster, the isthmus has attracted a peculiar kind of adventurer: men who gaze westward and see not geography but destiny. The conquistador claimed it for Castile; the canal-builders for commerce; the neo-imperialists for glory. Trump, by contrast, sees in the Canal a branding opportunity.

(Tomorrow, we look at how Trump’s second-term vendetta against Beijing is forcing Southeast Asia and its economy into an impossible calculus.)