Trump’s Panama Canal chaos

During his campaign for the presidency, Donald Trump talked a lot about pulling America out of international treaties and disentangling from military operations abroad.

Once in office, he started talking about the idea of Manifest Destiny—that the expansion of the US was both justified and inevitable. In some cases that’s meant turning the tables on America’s friends and allies.

For this week’s show, Reveal reporter Nate Halverson and Panamanian journalist Andrea Salcedo investigate how the Trump administration’s threats to reclaim the Panama Canal are fueling protests and destabilizing a longtime ally. Trump has said military force may be necessary to retake control of the canal from China.

“China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China, we gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back,” Trump said in January.

But the administration’s allegations about China’s control over the canal perplex many Panamanians.

“We just said wow, how many people can be wrong about the Chinese having a lot of influence over the Panama Canal?” says Jorge Luis Quijano, the canal’s top administrator from 2012 to 2019.

The Trump administration’s threats against Panama are also reviving painful memories of the 1989 US invasion that claimed the lives of an estimated 500 Panamanians.  

For wider context, host Al Letson speaks with Mother Jones reporter David Corn, who wrote about the Panama Canal in his book American Psychosis. Corn talks about how reclaiming the canal has been used as a political cudgel by conservatives in the US, from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump. Letson also speaks with Emma Ashford, a foreign policy expert at the Stimson Center, about how Panama fits into the Trump administration’s other moves on the international front.