Panama Canal

Donald Trump’s second term has been revolutionary in many ways, particularly in his administration’s approach to foreign affairs. From the get-go, the nomination of Marco Rubio as his top diplomat and Chris Landau as Rubio’s deputy signaled a break from orthodoxy. In picking Rubio, previously the most vocal senator on hemispheric affairs, and Landau, Trump’s ambassador to Mexico in his first term, the message was clear: our neighborhood is a top priority.  In his first exclusive magazine interview of his second term, Trump met with The Spectator’s Ben Domenech in the Oval Office, where a large portion of the conversation delved into Latin-American affairs.

The recent American interest in the Panama Canal is grounded and rational — contrary to media characterizations of the renewed focus as a byproduct of the president’s impulsive fixations. The Canal, as President Trump has correctly noted, was an American development in a nation that existed mostly as a consequence of American intervention. Panama provided the setting for the Canal — and America provided the Canal itself, having taken on, in 1903, the project France failed to complete in 1890. In the 1960s, when the United States began preparing its handover — not its return — to the Panamanian state, the concession was understood as the price of peace with an ascendant Third World.

New Year’s marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the collective freakout known as Y2K, when overwrought tech aficionados joined forces with Luddites to warn the world of the pending apocalypse of computer infrastructure that could run the global economy but was evidently incapable of resetting to “00” in date codes. Those chiliastic projections obviously did not come to pass, which is why we can spend 2025 reflecting on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day’s other Chicken Little situation — consternation over the transition that would, some skeptical parties feared, have catastrophic consequences for infrastructure central to the daily functioning of global markets, the final turnover of the Panama Canal.