The Monroe Doctrine, established in 1823, was originally drafted to protect U.S. interests against European powers that could try to recolonize South American countries gaining independence from Spain and to ward off Russian moves into the Pacific Northwest.
Czarist Russia bloodlessly desisted from attempts to colonize the West Coast and Alaska. However, U.S. hemispheric dominance has proved more difficult to enforce in Latin America, involving the U.S. in local conflicts that have led to past military interventions.
President Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, declared before the Organization of American States in 2013 that “the Monroe Doctrine is over.” But if President Donald Trump is serious about plans to take over Greenland and recover the Panama Canal, he will need to revive it. (RELATED: Rejuvenating the Monroe Doctrine)
Greenland may not present that much of a problem. Admiral James Stavridis, a former head of NATO, said that Trump’s proposal “is not such a crazy idea.” Greenland’s current semi-colonial ruler, Denmark, a small NATO ally, would have little choice but to settle for a solution granting independence to the 57,000 Inuit inhabitants who may be well disposed to some kind of incorporation with the U.S.
They gave a warm welcome to Donald Trump Jr. when he visited the vast Arctic island last week following his father’s offer to buy it. One Inuit native interviewed on television appeared to reflect local sentiment when he told a TV reporter that “Denmark is very small. It makes much more sense for us to join a major power like the United States.” Greenland’s prime minister, Mute Egede, said this week that his government was looking for ways to work more closely with President Trump.
The U.S. recently blocked a Chinese company from acquiring a major rare earth minerals reserve in Greenland, turning over the mining project to an American defense contractor for less than China offered to pay. The U.S. maintains an air base in northwest Greenland equipped with ballistic missile early warning systems and a space station monitoring the expanding Russian and Chinese naval activity in the Arctic.
Recovering the Panama Canal, on the other hand, involves stepping into the hornet’s nest of Latin America’s nationalistic politics that are increasingly influenced by China, Russia, and Iran. Successive Democrat administrations have allowed America’s main adversaries to develop a growing intelligence, economic, and military presence in the region teeming with far-left regimes, terrorist organizations, and drug cartels. (RELATED: China’s Challenge to the Monroe Doctrine)
Although Panama currently has a centrist government supposedly aligned with Washington, it was the first Latin American country to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative in 2018, after conceding three ports positioned on the Canal’s Pacific and Atlantic entrances to Chinese companies.
Panamanian authorities strongly deny Trump’s allegations that PLA personnel operate Canal facilities. They will not renegotiate the Canal treaty signed with President Jimmy Carter in 1977 and reject demands to lower the $100,000 tolls American vessels pay to use the waterway that provides the only close maritime link between the west and east coasts of the U.S. (RELATED: The Panama Canal and the Firing Line Debate)
Thousands of Americans died building the Canal in the harsh jungle conditions of the early 1900s. While Panama holds no official remembrance of their sacrifice, its top officials attend annual wreath-laying ceremonies honoring students killed in the 1964 anti-American riots inspired by Cuban communist agents.
When Bill Clinton turned over control of the Canal to Panama in 1999, U.S. intelligence agencies were surprised to learn that Chinese companies were taking over the management of its key ports. A defense official working at the U.S. military mission in Colombia told me, at the time when I was covering the region for UPI, that the Pentagon was concerned about PLA ties with the Hong Kong-registered port operator H.K. Hutchison, which was placing Chinese personnel in Canal facilities at the Port of Colon as the U.S. military vacated it.
Last year, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, General Laura Richardson, told the House Armed Services Committee that the CCP was surreptitiously gaining control of the Panama Canal by securing development projects via state-controlled Chinese companies. “The PRC is playing the ‘long game’ with its development of dual-use sites and facilities throughout the region .… In Panama, PRC-controlled State-Owned Enterprises … continue to bid on projects related to the Panama Canal.”
“In peace time this amount of influence allows China to have negational impact on Panamanian orientation to U.S. companies. In war, their acquired familiarity with the environment and Canal inner workings would allow them to shut it down or render it inoperable,” R. Evan Ellis Ph.D., a specialist on Latin America at the U.S. Army War College, told The American Spectator. He draws attention to secretive dealings between China and Panama, citing “eighteen non-transparent MOUs” signed between the two governments.
Former DIA director and Trump national security advisor, Michael Flynn, sees the Canal as the lynchpin of China’s strategy to control southern approaches to the U.S. “China controls 80 ports and components of ports throughout Latin America and the Caribbean,” he says. The state-owned Chinese company COSCO recently built a major new port in Peru where an emergency management center erected as part of the project is equipped with highly advanced technology that could easily be turned to military use, a U.N. diplomat who inspected the facility has told The American Spectator.
The Chinese were building a similar port in Argentina dominating the southern Straits of Magellan that would have given the PRC control over both hemispheric transoceanic connections. It was only stopped through last year’s election of conservative President Javier Milei, who has turned the project over to the U.S. Navy.
But China keeps gaining positions ever closer to U.S. borders. It’s engaged in bi-oceanic port projects in Mexico, from where drug cartels have been smuggling massive quantities of Chinese fentanyl into the U.S. along with some 20,000 military-age Chinese men entering illegally through Biden’s open border, according to U.S. security officials and members of Congress
Honduras’s leftist president, Xiomara Castro, has entered into ventures with Chinese companies for a major port expansion project, despite the aid and attention lavished on her by Biden, whose vice president, Kamala Harris, has held extensive talks with.
China is also building a highway connecting the port of San Lorenzo to locations near a U.S. air base that Castro has threatened to shut down in retaliation for mass deportations of illegal Honduran migrants. Beijing has close ties to the Sandinista dictatorship in neighboring Nicaragua, which is receiving Chinese military training, hosts a Russian radar station, and harbors plans for a second transoceanic canal through its territory.
China has been bankrolling the Maduro regime in Venezuela that’s entrenching itself through stolen elections and brutal repression, to the tune of $100 billion. “The unconditional, political, diplomatic, and economic support offered by Beijing has been key to keeping the Bolivarian regime in power,” says Venezuelan economist and oil expert, Carlos Eduardo Piña, who teaches at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
China built and launched Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar communications satellite, controlled from a PLA-built tracking station in Venezuela. The Chinese company ZTE has laid undersea cables connecting Venezuela and Cuba where the PLA is building a complex of electronic spy bases.
While these developments have been taking place, not a single clear statement has been issued by any U.S. president — Democrat or Republican — calling attention to China’s growing footprint on U.S. frontiers. Given China’s continuing military buildup and threatening moves around Taiwan, as well as its collusion with Russia in the war in Ukraine, calling out Panama over its ongoing concessions to China is long overdue.
Under the 1977 treaty that allowed Panama to assume sovereignty over the Canal, the U.S. reserved the right to use force to ensure the Canal’s security. President Bush sent in the 82nd Airborne in 1989 to remove Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega, over his drug deals with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel.
Current President José Raul Molino is democratically elected and has an altogether different style. But Ellis, who served on the U.S. State Department’s policy planning staff under the previous Trump administration, says that the U.S. should make it crystal clear to Panama that its ties with China are “sensitive” — now that there is a president with a crystal-clear head.
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