Trump’s ambition to retake the Panama Canal could have a heavy cost

In recent weeks, when he was President-elect Donald Trump publicly said that Panama should return the Panama Canal to the United States, and he would not rule out using military force to reclaim it. At his presidential Inauguration on Monday Trump doubled down on saying that his new administration was going to take back the canal.

In recent weeks, when he was president-elect, Donald Trump publicly said that Panama should return the Panama Canal to the United States and that he would not rule out using military force to reclaim it. At his presidential inauguration on Monday, Trump doubled down. Trump’s threat to upend decades of American policy and a war to seize the canal would be a major undertaking from a president who has railed against American military involvement in conflicts in the Middle East and would surely be hard to sell to the American public. It was President Jimmy Carter who negotiated the return of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians and secured the more-than-two-thirds vote in the US Senate necessary to ratify the Panama Canal treaties in 1978. Carter felt that returning the Panama Canal to Panama’s government was the right thing to do since it was a legacy of a time when the US exerted a quasi-colonial policy over Central America. It’s worth noting that it wasn’t just Carter who signed on to the Panama Canal treaties; presidents of both parties – Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton – all felt bound by the terms of the treaties, which were only fully implemented when the United States entirely transferred the operations of the Panama Canal over to Panama on December 31, 1999. Since then, the operation of the canal by the Panamanians has been a non-issue, and more than two-thirds of the ships transiting the canal are either coming or going to American ports, according to the US International Trade Administration.