Even after he spoke of it in his inaugural address, foreign policy mavens still didn’t quite know if they should take President Trump’s obsession with the Panama Canal seriously. Now that his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has just demanded “immediate changes” at the canal, no one is laughing anymore—at least no one should be.
The ostensible source of Trump’s concern is that, as he said in his address, “China is operating the Panama Canal, and we didn’t give it to China.” It’s true that a Hong Kong–based company operates ports on both the Atlantic and the Pacific ends of the waterway. This gives China a foothold that the authors of the treaty ceding the canal to Panama never contemplated. But it is not the same as “operating” the canal; the Panama Canal Authority, an autonomous agency, does that.
Whether the Hong Kong company’s position creates leverage China could use against the U.S. is nevertheless a matter of debate. What’s not debatable is Trump’s belief that it could. As he repeated after Rubio’s visit, “We’re going to take it back, or something very powerful is going to happen.”