The case for moving SOUTHCOM back to Panama
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.
