SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Trump, Panama and the Monroe Doctrine

https://x.com/agent_of_change/status/2073465461929300064

Trump, Panama and the Monroe Doctrine

Donald Trump has declared that the United States “will not let China take over the Panama Canal”.

Start with the obvious: China does not own, run or control the Panama Canal, and has no plans to do so. The canal is the sovereign property of Panama, operated by the Panama Canal Authority. The Chinese Embassy in Panama has stated plainly that China has never participated in the canal’s management or operation, respects Panama’s sovereignty over it, and recognises it as a permanently neutral international waterway. There is no Chinese takeover, planned or otherwise.

What actually exists is a modest commercial footprint. A Hong Kong company, CK Hutchison, won – through open bidding – the rights to handle cargo and warehousing at two terminals at either end of the canal. Terminals, not the waterway; commerce, not control. Chinese vessels transit the canal paying the same tolls, under the same rules, as everyone else.

And even that footprint is being dismantled: under relentless US pressure, Hutchison’s ports are being sold to a consortium led by the US asset manager BlackRock, while Panama has already been strong-armed out of the Belt and Road Initiative.

There’s a rich historical irony here. The one country that has actually seized and controlled the canal is the United States. Washington engineered Panama’s secession from Colombia in 1903 to build and own the canal; the US held Panama as a colonial enclave for most of the twentieth century; and invaded the country in 1989, killing hundreds of Panamanians. It returned the canal only because a mass sovereignty movement, and the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, forced it to. To this day the US retains a treaty-based claim to send troops into Panama whenever it unilaterally decides a “security risk” exists. If you want to identify the foreign power that constrains Panama’s sovereignty, there it is.

This is the Monroe Doctrine, alive and well. Trump’s own National Security Strategy states the aim plainly: to “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to… own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere”. Latin America is once again to be treated as the imperial backyard, and any Chinese presence – however commercial, however welcomed by the host nation – recast as a hostile incursion to be purged.

And the canal is only one piece on a much larger board. Driving Chinese investors out of Panama belongs to a broader global strategy: the same logic behind Washington’s designs on Greenland, Iceland, the Baltic and the Strait of Hormuz. The goal is to control the world’s trade routes, keep the oil trade priced in dollars, and preserve a financial system so thoroughly weaponised that the US can seize any country’s assets at will – as it has done with Venezuela’s gold, Russia’s reserves and Iran’s savings. Panama’s canal is a chokepoint on that map, and the “China threat” is simply the pretext for tightening Washington’s grip on it.

But Latin American countries are turning to China for a reason. Since establishing ties with Panama in 2017, China has helped revive stalled infrastructure and supported the country’s coffee industry through the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. Across the region, trade with, and investment from, China have grown more than 20-fold since 2000, and the new Chancay mega-port in Peru is reshaping trade across the Pacific – cooperation on terms of sovereign equality and mutual benefit that Washington has never offered and never will.

The real question isn’t whether China will “take over” the Panama Canal. It’s whether Panama, and the region, get to make their own choices – or whether the empire next door still decides for them.