Panama won’t be Trump’s Suez Crisis
President Donald Trump, in his first days in office, has made a series of statements. Among these is the assertion that the USA will “take back” the Panama Canal. In historical terms, this is a revival of the Monroe Doctrine under which the US has sought to keep hostile powers out of the Western hemisphere. President Trump seeks to restrict potential hostile influence over a key route of naval movement: if the US Navy’s access to the canal were to be restricted, it would be much less able to move forces between the Pacific and Atlantic to meet emerging threats.
There’s ample historical precedent for such initiatives. Britain, America’s predecessor as the leading naval power, similarly sought to keep hostile or potentially hostile powers away from key waterways. One example was British attempts to keep Russia away from the Bosporus and the Dardanelles (in modern-day Turkey) in the 1850s and 1877-8.
Another key example, of course, is the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. This was the crucial route for Britain as a Mediterranean, Asian and Australasian naval power. The Suez isthmus was important to Britain even before the canal was built: this led Nelson to Aboukir Bay and his most complete victory, the Battle of the Nile in 1798. It led a British force to defeat the French in Egypt in 1801. Subsequently, the need to control Suez led to the conquest of Egypt and the despatch of significant forces in both world wars.
But in the context of Suez and Britain, most people today think of the intervention of 1956. Then Egyptian president Nasser’s pan-Arabism was perceived as a threat to British and French interests and attack was seen as the best form of defence. President Trump, today, talks of Chinese influence in Panama.
Suez is frequently held up as a failure. Implementation was definitely too slow, compromising the plan’s chances for ultimate success, but the assault when it finally came was a textbook military victory. There were bases nearby to support the assault, in Cyprus, Malta and Libya, and there was considerable institutional experience available from previous amphibious operations, from the 1942 conquest of Madagascar from Vichy forces onwards. The Soviet Union lacked countervailing naval assets in the Mediterranean. Air superiority permitted the world’s first helicopter-borne assaults to be made: perhaps not coincidentally, the operation also saw the last major British parachute drop, at El Gamil.
What was missing was a replacement for Nasser’s regime – an equivalent of the Shah in Iran or other local regimes supported during the 20th century by Britain and America in Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait.
America has, of course, intervened and carried out regime change in Panama before, in 1989-90. In that case, the deposed General Noriega was simply enough replaced by his elected opponent, Guillermo Endara. It’s not immediately clear whether Trump proposes another regime change in Panama, or merely seizure of the canal.
But he may stop short of either. The canal, while important, is not a first-order strategic priority for America today. The recent reduction in its capacity due to droughts, and consequent limits on the rate at which its locks can be refilled, has also made it less important than it was. Some means short of risky brinkmanship can probably be found to assure American interests there.
In any event, the results of the Suez Crisis do not mean that military power projection by Trump is doomed to failure, any more than America’s 1989 Panama outcome is proof that he would succeed.