Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first trip abroad signals to the world that the Monroe Doctrine is back. Rubio is visiting five nations in Central America and the Caribbean, including El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Panama, where the Panama Canal connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rubio noted in a Wall Street Journal article that “It’s no accident that my first trip abroad as secretary of state will keep me in the [Western] hemisphere.”
Trump has stated that … China’s potential control of the Canal is both an economic and national security threat to the United States.
Unsurprisingly, Rubio’s first stop is in Panama, where Rubio addressed the topic of U.S. control of the Panama Canal and China’s growing influence in the region. U.S. special envoy to Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone said that China’s presence at the Canal raises important national security concerns for the United States. Other topics of discussion with the region’s leaders will include immigration and drug trafficking.
A little more than a decade ago, the Obama administration declared that the Monroe Doctrine was dead. In a continuation of Obama’s apology tour, then-Secretary of State John Kerry told the Organization of American States that our relationship with Latin America is “not about a United States declaration about how and when it will intervene in the affairs of other American states. It’s about all of our countries viewing one another as equals … adhering not to a doctrine but to the decisions that we make as partners to advance the values and the interests we share.” “The era of the Monroe Doctrine is over,” Kerry said. James Monroe and John Quincy Adams were undoubtedly turning over in their graves.
The world, especially China, took notice of Obama’s abandonment of the Monroe Doctrine. Kerry’s speech happened to coincide with President Xi Jinping’s announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an economic and geopolitical program to advance China’s political influence throughout the world, including Latin America. A Council on Foreign Relations report noted that China began making inroads to Latin America in 2001, and today it is South America’s top trading partner and second only to the United States for all of Latin America.
A second Council on Foreign Relations report on the BRI notes that “U.S. inaction as much as Chinese assertiveness is responsible for the economic and strategic predicament in which the United States finds itself.” China has disguised geopolitical assertiveness as “infrastructure projects” throughout the Western Hemisphere.
That includes, most ominously, the construction of ports at both ends of the Panama Canal. A Center for Strategic and International Studies report notes that Chinese state-owned companies have positioned themselves at both ends of the Canal, including control of Margarita Island on the Atlantic side via port concession agreements. President Trump has stated that he believes China’s potential control of the Canal is both an economic and national security threat to the United States.
So what can be done? Constitutional scholars John Yoo and Robert Delahunty argue that Trump should invoke the Monroe Doctrine and declare that Panama, by “permitting extensive penetration of the territory surrounding the Canal … is compromising the security and neutrality of the Canal and thereby violating the Panama Canal Treaties of 1978. Those treaties, Yoo and Delahunty note, “permits armed intervention by the United States … to protect the Canal.”
Moreover, President Trump has the exclusive constitutional authority to terminate the treaties and reassert U.S. sovereignty over the Canal Zone. There is no need for the Senate’s advice and consent. Yoo and Delahunty contend Trump has this treaty termination power under Article II of the Constitution (“executive power”); the tradition of the appointments clause which provides for Senate confirmation of key executive branch nominees but has not prevented presidents from unilaterally terminating those appointments; Supreme Court precedent that “recognizes that the President has sole constitutional responsibility to conduct all diplomacy for the United States”; actual practice, including President Carter’s abrogation of our mutual defense treaty with Taiwan; and, finally, the Office of Legal Counsel has opined that presidents have exclusive treaty termination authority.
President Theodore Roosevelt once remarked that “by far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was president related to the Panama Canal.” President Trump agrees.
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