Notes

5 W Main: We May Dominate the World. During his inauguration last week, U.S. President Donald Trump said, “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.” He was apparently referring to the fact that the Hong Kong-based company CK Hutchison Holdings operates two of the Panama Canal’s five ports. Meanwhile, Trump has recently mused about annexing Canada and Greenland.

All three countries have let the United States government know they’re not available for seizure. Fortunately for Canada, the U.S. is in no position even to try taking it, and Greenland is covered by the European Union’s security guarantees. But could Panama be different?

In international relations, Trump has exhibited a tendency to open with maximalist threats, later to settle through normal negotiations. But there’s at least a strategic through line between his invocation of the Chinese presence in Panama and America’s diplomatic past: Historically, great-power rivalries have, in moments, given Washington a rationale to threaten or even launch military interventions in nearby countries.

Sean Mirski’s We May Dominate the World: Ambition, Anxiety, and the Rise of the American Colossus traces the history of how the United States pushed the European empires out of the Western hemisphere. It happened, Mirski writes, through a series of “security dilemmas,” in which the U.S. feared that European powers, if given the least foothold in the Americas, might potentially use it to strike America in the future. In essence, Washington faced the option either to let its rivals establish a presence in weak neighboring states or preemptively to do so itself through military intervention or outright conquest.

So, too, in Panama. In the late 1870s, when French engineers organized the Compagnie Universelle to build a canal through the country, the U.S. objected on the grounds that it’d give a foreign power control over one of America’s most vital maritime routes. “The politics of this country,” said President Rutherford B. Hayes, “is a canal under American control.”

By the turn of the century, the U.S. had ejected the European powers from the region altogether. And in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt sponsored a revolution in Panama against Colombia in order to complete the canal under American control. But as Mirski notes, Roosevelt went for a far more aggressive course than what security considerations alone really needed. In other words, Trump’s rhetoric may be strange, but it isn’t new: Great-power rivalries have long afforded their rivaling great powers the pretext to play rough with smaller countries.

—Gustav Jönsson