Fact vs. Trump Fiction in Panama
The president claims Chinese soldiers are working in the canal. That’s nonsense.
Feb. 9, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
Secretary of State Marco Rubio went on Fox last week to cite a “Hong Kong shipping vessel” in the Panama Canal as evidence that China is exercising “effective control” of the waterway. He was wrong on two fronts. First, the Panamanian-flagged ship belonged to a South Korean company. Second, the 47-year-old U.S.-Panama treaty governing “the permanent neutrality and operation” of the canal means ships from any country are allowed to use it.
Mr. Rubio knows this. He loudly denounced Cuba’s effort to sneak arms through the canal to North Korea in 2013. But ever since President Trump announced on Dec. 21 that he wants to tear up the treaty and reclaim the canal for Americans, fiction has ruled the U.S. narrative.
It may be that by bullying one of the few U.S. allies in the region, Mr. Trump intends only to negotiate the toll rates that the canal authority charges all its customers and reduce China’s presence in Panama. Let’s hope so.
Panama hasn’t violated the treaty and says it won’t relinquish the canal. Retaking it would require economic or military force and a U.S. occupation. Marching on a weaker, law-abiding democracy would be Putinesque. It would also be a broken promise from a president who ran on a pledge to curtail foreign adventures. If U.S. moral authority in the world matters at all to Republicans, they might want to pump the brakes on this one.
The Trump assault on Panama began on Dec. 21, when the president-elect declared that Americans are “being ripped off at the Panama Canal.” He didn’t mention that the Panama Canal Advisory Board, chaired by a retired U.S. Navy admiral, reviews toll increases.
The canal authority, independent of the government, is a business with a bottom line. It has to budget for regular maintenance and capital expenditures, such as the third set of locks, costing $5.25 billion, that it completed in 2016.
During an August 2017 visit, then-Vice President Mike Pence recognized the canal authority’s good stewardship. Seven months later U.S. Ambassador John Feeley resigned and the post remained open until 2022, which may explain why U.S. influence in the country waned in those years.
Chinese soldiers aren’t “lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal,” as Mr. Trump claimed on Christmas Day. “The United States” didn’t lose “38,000 lives in building” the canal—another Trump whopper. The number of total deaths, according to historian David McCullough, was 5,609. About 350 were “white Americans,” he wrote in “The Path Between the Seas.” Most of those who perished were migrant workers from the West Indies.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz convened a Commerce Committee hearing last month. Trump-appointed Federal Maritime Commission Chairman Louis Sola asserted that ships going in and out of the two cargo ports run by a Panama subsidiary of Hong Kong’s Hutchison Port Holdings “block the traffic of the canal every single time.”
That’s false, former Panama Canal Authority administrator Jorge Quijano told me. But with no one to discuss canal security protocols, senators channeled Tom Clancy: Hypotheticals included Beijing’s ordering Hutchison to stop work in order to freeze the global economy and China’s jamming shipping lanes and blocking U.S. military transit during an attack on Taiwan.
Panama has long struggled with corruption. Its agreement last week to wind down China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the country is a win for Mr. Rubio.
But there are no Belt and Road projects in the independent Panama Canal, and the canal authority has never been accused of corruption. More than 99% of canal authority employees are Panamanian. The waterway is guarded by Panamanian air and maritime services. Hutchison Ports has 53 concessions worldwide, including the largest container port in the U.K. and Ensenada, Mexico, just south of the U.S. border.
Mr. Feeley and Mari Carmen Aponte, another former U.S. ambassador to Panama, laid out key facts in a Jan. 27 letter to Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington. They noted U.S. Southern Command, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Homeland Security Department and “multiple” U.S. intelligence agencies “have an ongoing presence in Panama and routinely engage” there with their counterparts and the international shipping interests. Port concessionaires, they noted, can’t “block or sabotage the Canal operations.”
China does present cyber threats to the canal, the ambassadors said. But such attacks “can be launched from anywhere in the world.” That’s why, “in the spirit of upholding the Neutrality Treaty,” the canal authority recently signed a cybersecurity agreement with U.S. Southern Command.
The antidote to China’s “creeping commercial expansion” in Panama, the ambassadors wrote, is greater “U.S. commercial interest and activity.” Instead, the Trump administration is making stuff up, swinging a big stick, and humiliating a friend. This is strengthening the anti-American left in the country. That’s not diplomacy. It’s insanity.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.