Revisiting the Panama Canal Debate of 1978
The uproar over Trump’s remarks about the Canal recalls a lively debate from the late 1970s.
What was old is new again.
In his inaugural address on Monday, President Donald J. Trump, the first ex-president to take the oath of office since 1893, gave every indication that he intends to use his final four years in office as a disrupter and perhaps even destroyer of the status quo. Issues long thought to have been settled by both law and precedent, have, thanks to Trump, elbowed their way back into the public square.
One such issue is control of the Panama Canal. In his second inaugural address, Mr. Trump charged that the Canal,
has foolishly been given to the country of Panama after the United States…spent more money than ever spent on a project before and lost 38,000 lives in the building of the Panama Canal.
We have been treated very badly from this foolish gift that should have never been made, and Panama’s promise to us has been broken.
The purpose of our deal and the spirit of our treaty has been totally violated… And above all, China is operating the Panama Canal. And we didn’t give it to China. We gave it to Panama, and we’re taking it back.
As with so much else driving Trump’s foreign policy agenda, it seems squarely aimed at sending a message to China. Yet, as with the political battles over abortion, immigration, tariffs, even Canada, the debate over control of the Canal is not new.
Mr. Trump’s threat to revisit the terms of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties (1978), which eventually ceded control of the Panama Canal to Panama while guaranteeing its neutrality, recalls one of the more lively and elucidating intra-conservative debates of the past half-century.
The unlikely antagonists in yesteryear’s debate over the Canal were none other than the former two-term governor of California and future president, Ronald Reagan, and the putative godfather of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley Jr.
It wasn’t very often, given their long friendship and political affinities, that Reagan and Buckley found themselves on opposite sides of issues of public controversy. But by the late 1970s, the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, as well as the Democratic administration of Mr. Carter, had signaled that the time had come to revisit the terms of the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty (1903) which granted the US permanent rights to the Canal zone.
Reagan’s 1976 primary challenge to the Republican incumbent Ford included a memorable attack on the Nixon-Kissinger-Ford position in favor of handing back control to Panama: “We built it, we paid for it, it’s ours!” The historian Joshua Zeitz recently noted in POLITICO that Reagan’s gambit proved to be an “unusually potent campaign issue, tipping both presidential primaries and congressional races in states as far and wide as Colorado, New Hampshire and Idaho.”
But there were those within the conservative movement who disagreed with their once and future hero, Reagan—the most influential being Buckley, the editor-in-chief of National Review and the host of the PBS public affairs program Firing Line. Buckley, who could never be accused of chasing ratings, chose to host a two-hour debate on the topic. (Christopher Hitchens once wrote that, for the final episode of Firing Line, which focused on taxation and the internet, Buckley chose to go out in a “a blaze of tedium.”)
The principals, Buckley and Reagan, were allowed to pick their respective debate squads—Reagan recruited the future founder of The American Conservative, Patrick J. Buchanan, the Latin American affairs expert Roger Fontaine, and the Navy’s Admiral John McCain Jr.—father of the future Senator from Arizona. Buckley was joined by his longtime NR colleague and former Marxist theorist James Burnham, the columnist George Will, and Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker (an aside: Why don’t we have Ambassadors with names like that anymore?) was present to answer any technical questions about the treaty while former U.S. Senator Sam Ervin of Watergate fame served as moderator.
Recorded before a live audience at the University of South Carolina, the debate was substantive, civil, and even occasionally fun.
The opening exchange of questions went like this:
REAGAN: Well, Bill, my first question is, Why haven’t you already rushed across the room here to tell me that you’ve seen the light?
BUCKLEY: I’m afraid that if I came any closer to you the force of my illumination would blind you.
Reagan, like Trump, wanted to keep control of the Canal zone—but for different reasons. For Trump it’s all about China—for Reagan it was that evergreen bugaboo of the U.S. foreign policy establishment: credibility.
Said Reagan:
I don’t believe that in Latin America we would do anything to strengthen our position by, again, yielding to the unpleasantness in this treaty. I think, if anything, we would become a laughingstock by surrendering to unreasonable demands, and by doing so, I think we cloak weakness in the suit of virtue.
Buckley, on the other hand, sounded a very different key, noting,
The fact of the matter is that there are people in Panama who don’t accept the notion of Governor Reagan about the undisputed, unambiguous sovereignty that the United States exercises over that territory. We do have there the absolute right, which I do not deny and which my colleagues do not deny, to stay there as long as we want. But to say that we have sovereignty, as Governor Reagan has said, is to belie the intention of the people who supervised our diplomacy in the early part of the century, and it is also to urge people to believe that we harbor an appetite for colonialism.
While the debate over the future of the Canal will almost certainly divide Democrats from Republicans, it also has the potential to divide the navel-gazers who comprise the “realist and restraint” foreign policy community here in Washington. After all, one can easily dream up arguments for re-claiming the Canal on realist grounds—especially (perhaps solely) as they relate to China—but it would be the height of hypocrisy to claim any such move would reflect the priorities of “restrainers”—especially if Trump attempts to reclaim the Canal by force.
In the end, Trump has reopened debate around what was thought to be a long settled issue; perhaps it would be too much to hope that those on both sides of the current debate over the future of the Panama Canal follow the example set by Reagan and Buckley back in 1978.
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