Someday an updated edition of The Art of the Deal may be placed on the bookshelf next to Halford Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality, Nicholas Spykman’s America’s Strategy in World Politics, and Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Problem of Asia given the events of the last few days. President Donald Trump has placed geoeconomics in the service of geopolitics to advance U.S. interests in the Western Hemisphere. He has used the economic sword of tariffs to achieve diplomatic and geopolitical results in record time, as Panama, Mexico, and Canada have all promised to pursue Trump’s geopolitical agendas in the hemisphere. Somewhere in heaven, John Quincy Adams is smiling.

Trump’s hemispheric agenda includes fairer trade with our neighbors, a crackdown on fentanyl and other deadly drugs from coming into the United States, control of the U.S. northern and southern borders, and lessening and then eliminating China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. It has rightly been called the “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”
Geoeconomics in Service to Geopolitics
Trump sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Panama, where he told Panama’s leaders in no uncertain terms that China’s current involvement at both ends of the Panama Canal is unacceptable and wouldn’t be tolerated by the Trump administration. Rubio noted that China’s presence in and around the Canal Zone is both an economic and national security concern for the United States. (RELATED: China Poses a Severe Threat in Panama and Leaves the US With No Choice.)
Meanwhile, Trump was telling journalists that he intended to take back control of the Canal Zone by unilaterally terminating the 1978 treaties signed by President Carter and confirmed by the U.S. Senate that gave control of the Canal to Panama. (RELATED: The Panama Canal and the Firing Line Debate)
Shortly after meeting with Secretary Rubio, Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino announced that Panama would not be renewing its agreement with China that it entered in...