‘We Dug It, We Own It’

The case for American ownership of the Panama Canal

In 1978, the Carter administration made a deal with General Omar Torrijos, the uniformed socialist strongman who had seized power in Panama, to abandon America’s crown jewel.

The Panama Canal had been built with over a decade of labor and half a billion of early twentieth century dollars by American engineers and visionaries who succeeded where the British and the French had failed, in the process they created a new country, Panama, and new trade routes.

Jimmy Carter had run for office promising to oppose a surrender of the canal. As with most of his policies, he turned out to have been lying. Even though the majority of Americans opposed the giveaway, Carter, Democrat Senate Majority Leader and KKK leader Robert Byrd, teamed up with GOP Senate Minority Leader Howard Baker, the worst RINO in Senate history, to conduct the surrender. This move would cost Baker his chances at a presidential nomination.

While Reagan’s election triumph tends to be credited to the economy, there is no doubt that his declaration, “we dug it, we own it” about the Panama Canal powered him to a primary win over Baker who was the favorite son of the D.C. establishment and Rockefeller Republicans.

Carter, the Klansman and the RINO managed to get the two Senate Republican votes they needed, including former Sen. Bob Packwood, and ensured the rise of Reagan and a conservative revolution. America lost the canal but it also bid goodbye to Jimmy Carter.

The Panama Canal treaty was similarly unpopular in Panama. Legal ratification of the treaty required a referendum. The leftist military dictatorship claimed to have carried one out in which a majority voted for the deal, but they did so at gunpoint. When Carter visited Panama in the summer of 1978, the leftist government had suppressed protests by shooting, killing and beating political opponents, making the treaty as illegitimate on Panama’s end as it was on America’s.

Since then the Panama Canal has always represented unfinished business.

The surrender of the Panama Canal had been based on worthless assurances that America would retain strategic control over it. These assurances were particularly worthless since Panama was under the boot of a Communist affiliated military dictator who, as Reagan rightly noted, is “there, not because he had the most votes, but because he had the most guns.”

Now China has effectively taken over the Panama Canal while America has done nothing.

Panama joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It recently renewed a contract with Hutchison Ports, a Hong Kong based company, to manage the canal. The ports around the canal are also controlled by Chinese companies. China has built four bridges over the canal and controls much of the construction projects and the vital infrastructure in Panama.

China for all intents and purposes controls the Panama Canal, the ports around it and the local infrastructure that makes international trade possible. The canal is essentially Chinese property.

The Biden administration had watched impotently as China dug its claws into the canal.

“We do not want to put Panama in a situation where they have to choose between the United States and the People’s Republic of China,” Ambassador Mari Carmen Aponte, who dates back to the Carter administration, whined.

President Trump took a very different approach, arguing that if the “principles” of the Neutrality Treaty aren’t followed,“then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America in full, quickly and without question.”

When President George H.W. Bush announced he was intervening militarily to remove General Noriega from power, he did it by invoking the “integrity of the Panama Canal Treaty.”

China’s dominance of the Panama Canal is a far graver threat to the treaty than Noreiga.

A former Joint Chiefs chair argued back in the 1990s that China’s control over the Panama Canal allows it to “control the order of ships” and has “the right to deny ships access to the ports and entrances of the canal if they are deemed to be interfering with Hutchison’s business” which is “in direct violation of the 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, which guarantees expeditious passage for the United States Navy.” Panama has been in violation of the Neutrality Treaty for a generation and the situation has only worsened with the expansion of China’s naval power.

America should reclaim one of its great achievements and protect its national security.

The wording of the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty stated that “the Republic of Panama grants to the United States in perpetuity, the use, occupation and control of a zone of land and land under water for the construction, maintenance, operation, sanitation and protection of said Canal.”

The Carter administration had argued that its Neutrality Treaty would allow America to give up physical control of the Panama Canal but still prevent the Soviet Union from taking it over.

Torrijos himself had stated that “we are agreeing to a treaty of neutrality which places us under the protection of the Pentagon.”

Now Communist China has all but taken over the Panama Canal.

The Neutrality Treaty was supposed to assure that American vessels would be able to rapidly move through the canal in the event of a war. Are we supposed to believe that Chinese companies, in the event of a war with China, would not interfere, obstruct or spy on the movement of US Navy ships?

Carter’s treaty, passed over the objections of most Americans, with a military dictator and his repressive regime, was never even legitimately ratified on Panama’s end and certainly was not upheld by that country. After a generation of violations that have never been remedied, President Trump is right to call on America to reclaim physical control over the canal.

It may be time to revert back to Teddy Roosevelt’s Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty and its promise of American control “in perpetuity,” over Carter’s failed promise of neutrality exploited by China.

The surrender of the Panama Canal had been a longtime project of State Department globalists in the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations who had argued that maintaining control of the canal led to resentment against us in Latin America and the Third World. Despite their arguments, surrendering the canal did nothing to make America more popular, only weaker.

Panama was a country that President Teddy Roosevelt created using military force to make the canal possible. The idea that a province we turned into a country to enable us to build a canal has ‘sovereignty’ over something that we had created was absurd to begin with. It’s even more absurd now that Panama has become a Chinese puppet to talk about its sovereignty.

As Reagan said all those years ago, “we dug it, we own it”. China bought it from the people that Carter gave it away to in violation of the treaty that we signed with those people.

The Panama Canal is no longer in Panama’s hands and hasn’t been in a while. It’s in China’s hands. That gives us every reason we need to take what we built back from Communist China.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.