Donald Trump and the great Panama Canal tantrum

As he gears up to retake the presidency of the United States this month, Donald Trump has spontaneously begun threatening to retake the Panama Canal, as well.

Per the incoming president’s recent tantrums on social media, Panama is “ripping off” the US with “ridiculous” fees to use the interoceanic waterway and principal conduit for global commerce. As Trump sees it, the Central American country’s behaviour is especially objectionable “knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama by the US”.

Trump has also baselessly alleged that Chinese troops are currently operating the canal. In reality, of course, the Panama Canal was previously operated by none other than the United States, which built the canal at the beginning of the 20th century and only handed over control to Panama in 1999.

As for the “extraordinary generosity” allegedly extended to the country by the friendly local superpower, just recall the US military’s so-called “Operation Just Cause”, launched in December 1989, thanks to which the impoverished neighbourhood of El Chorrillo in the Panamanian capital of Panama City earned the moniker “Little Hiroshima”.

Up to several thousand civilians were killed in the maniacal display of firepower, a practice run for the upcoming US war on Iraq. For his part, Panamanian leader and former US buddy Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces on January 3, 1990, after his stay at the Vatican embassy in Panama City had been soundly disrupted by a playlist of musical torture blasting from the US tanks parked outside. Selected tunes included Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive”.

Noriega was carted off to Miami to face drug trafficking and other charges – never mind his lengthy history on the CIA payroll despite full US knowledge of said narco-activity. His removal meanwhile paved the way for far greater involvement in the international drug trade by Panama’s ruling class.

Just call it “extraordinary generosity”.

As for earlier bouts of generosity, the US from 1903 until 1979 presided over a de facto colony by the name of the Panama Canal Zone, which encompassed a significant portion of Panamanian territory and abided by a system of racial segregation that persisted even after such things were officially abolished in the US proper. The Canal Zone also played host to all manner of US military bases and other installations such as the notorious US Army School of the Americas, attended by many a Latin American dictator and death squad leader as well as by Noriega himself.

The United States completed the construction of the Panama Canal in 1914 – an undertaking that claimed countless thousands of lives and relied heavily on dark-skinned labour and chain-gang servitude. An exercise in world dominance rather than “generosity”, the building of the canal commenced during the reign of US President Theodore Roosevelt, who was obsessed with the idea that the waterway was “the vital – the indispensable – path to a global destiny for the United States of America”, as historian David McCullough notes in his tome The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914.

When Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1901, Panama still belonged to Colombia, but the negotiations between the Colombian government and the US over the proposed canal proved less than smooth. And voila: the new nation of Panama was thus born in 1903, midwifed by Roosevelt and more than thrilled to cede a chunk of its territory as well as national sovereignty to the US.

As John Weeks and Phil Gunson put it in their book Panama: Made in the USA, the country was “carved out of the heart of Latin America to serve the objectives of a foreign power”. And to this day, Panama bears the scars of the carving. One prominent Panama City thoroughfare is still named after Roosevelt, although Fourth of July Avenue has been renamed Martyrs’ Avenue in honour of the victims of the January 1964 flag riots. On that particular occasion, US forces killed some 21 people after Panamanian students attempted to raise their flag next to the US one at a Canal Zone high school.

As it so happens, Trump has his own connection to the Panama City landscape in the form of a waterfront luxury condo that was formerly branded the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower and is still referred to locally as “the Trump” despite the elimination of his surname from the sign. In 2017, NBC reported that the Trump Organization had licensed its name to the 70-storey building, which was “riddled with ties to drug money and international organized crime”.

That said, it’s not like Panama is an issue that has ever kept Trump up at night. Rather, the sudden threats to recuperate the Panama Canal are simply of piece with the president-elect’s “America First” approach to riling his fan base into a delirium of pompous entitlement – all with the help of hallucinated affronts to US “generosity”.

As if America weren’t already “first” in terms of wreaking havoc throughout the world. But, hey, when you’re the world’s number one imperial superpower, you get to have your cake and be the victim, too.

McCullough writes how, in the midst of failed canal negotiations in Washington in 1902, Colombian diplomat Dr José Vicente Concha made the following observation regarding his gringo counterparts: “The desire to make themselves appear, as a Nation, most respectful of the rights of others forces these gentlemen to toy a little with their prey before devouring it, although when all is said and done, they will do so in one way or other.”

And while Trump can hardly be bothered with feigning respect, the US certainly hasn’t lost its appetite for toying with its prey.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.