President-elect Donald Trump’s recent lament that the United States ceded control of the Panama Canal to Panama under the Carter administration is both strategically sound and historically resonant. Trump, the most consequential conservative president since Ronald Reagan, shares with the Gipper both an instinctual understanding of U.S. national interests and, more specifically, a healthy skepticism about the logic of ceding the American-built canal.

Trump’s recent comments echo closely those of Reagan during the 1978 debate over the ratification of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties that ended U.S. sovereignty over the canal. Reagan, preparing to challenge Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, said he would “talk as long and as loud as I can against it” and warned presciently that “I think that basically the world is not going to see this [giving away the canal] as a magnanimous gesture on our part, as the White House would have us believe.”

Like many of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives, Reagan’s persistent opposition to the cession of the canal earned him the derision of the foreign policy cognoscenti of his day. Even William F. Buckley, Jr., the patron saint of the modern conservative movement, broke with Reagan and supported returning the canal to Panama. Yet Reagan, like Trump, understood the American interest in the canal went beyond U.S. relations with the Panamanians or the potential for gaining an amorphous quantum of “goodwill” from the Third World (today, often called the “Global South”) by granting local control.

First, as in Reagan’s time, the Panama Canal today serves essential military purposes for the United States, which alone justify continued American control. Moving the preponderance of U.S. naval power in a crisis from the East to West Coasts and eventually into the Pacific Theater itself will require unobstructed access to the canal. This was the early twentieth-century logic that compelled President Theodore Roosevelt to undertake its construction in the first place and that dictated the dimensions of U.S. naval ship construction well into this century to ensure naval vessels were capable of traversing the canal’s lock system. While today’s ships are larger and warfare more complex, the basic necessity of moving significant naval tonnage along the shortest route remains unchanged since the canal’s completion in 1914. 

Second, like during the Cold War, the canal is on the front lines of great power rivalry, this time between the United States and China. While Washington has been mired in forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a Hong-Kong-based company acquired two of Panama’s five principal ports and is constructing a deep-water port, cruise terminal, and a fourth bridge across the canal. As is the case from Africa to the South Pacific, China uses such infrastructure to gain coercive economic and political control, as manifested in its pressure campaign to force Panama to cease recognizing Taiwan in 2017. It would be the height of naïveté to assume Beijing’s interest in Panama and the canal has nothing to do with the strategic significance of the waterway for U.S. national defense. 

Finally, Reagan saw U.S. control of the canal as directly related to American influence on the world stage and the seriousness with which Washington’s words were taken in foreign capitals. “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?” Reagan asked during the debate over the canal’s transfer. Like his predecessor, Trump appears to view the ability of the United States to influence and counter adversary influence over the canal as a test case for Washington’s global sway. If one of the great marvels of American engineering know-how and national grit can be recklessly handed away, in spite of all strategic logic, and placed under the perpetual threat of foreign interference, what message would be sent to adversaries from Tehran to Moscow to Pyongyang?

Trump’s comments suggesting a possible American reacquisition of the canal were met with predictable howls from Washington think tanks and even Chinese Communist Party propaganda rags. Yet our forty-fifth and forty-seventh president, much like the fortieth president before him, possesses an innate sense of America’s core national interests, which seems to elude Washington’s great and good. As Trump returns to the Oval Office, this discernment will find a world in desperate need of an American president willing to pursue controversial causes for the strategic advantage of his country and the safety of its citizens. 

Alexander Gray served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the White House National Security Council, 2019–21.

Image: Jose Mario Espinoza / Shutterstock.com.