Trump, the Panama Canal, and US Sovereignty Politics

By Jennifer Mittelstadt

President Trump’s demand that, "… the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, quickly and without question” came a surprise to many Americans. It’s likely that few had thought about the Panama Canal, except in passing, for decades. But for Trump’s inner circle and supporters, the canal threat was no shock.

The call to retake the canal as US territory draws on a century-old vein of right-wing politics that defined itself as the bulwark protecting US sovereignty from the perceived dangers of 20^th-century internationalism -- organizations like the UN, the World Court, international defense agreements, and the practices of global governance. This idea of sovereignty is a politics that asserts liberty from international agreements and institutions that threaten to limit the sovereign jurisdiction and governance of the US -- of its territory, peoples, and borders, and of its projected claims elsewhere. Trump the man is not easily categorizable. And policy makers and advisors in his inner circle evince a range of ideological impulses. But still, many among them would recognize Trumpism as being, in their own words, “sovereigntist.”

The reanimation of this sovereigntist agenda is clearly visible today in Trump’s broader rejections of the UN, NATO, and other international bodies and agreements. It drives the right’s harsh campaign to protect national borders against immigration. It helps explain Trump’s affinity for other anti-internationalist, anti-UN regimes and movements, such as that of EU-skeptic Victor Orban’s Hungary or Italy’s Georgia Meloni. And it also explains his belligerent and proprietary stance toward the former US territory of the Panama Canal.

Sovereigntist politics originated over 100 years ago in the movement against internationalism that followed WWI and the formation of the League of Nations. The League captured the hopes of many for a more peaceful, orderly world. Key among them were those seeking independence from empire – colonized or formerly colonized nations -- who hoped to use the League to press their claims for greater self-governance and international representation. 

Among some in the US, however, it was precisely these hopes of the colonized – of non-white people – for greater equality and self-determination that made the League so dangerous. This world government, they argued, would introduce a supranational form of governance that would threaten US sovereign control of its territory and peoples. It would especially disrupt the governance white, native-born Americans enjoyed, inheritors, in their own view, of venerable traditions of Anglo-Saxon political culture. As Senator James Reed of Missouri put it, counting the many Asian, African, and Latin American countries that would be members of the League, “I will not consent to delegate to any other race or nation any of the sovereign powers of the United States which belong to our people.”

The movement grew after WWI, even though the US did not join the League, and sought to defeat “the subtle poison of internationalism,” as one sovereigntist put it.  It evolved over the decades, as the features and scope of liberal and left internationalism took new forms and posed new perceived challenges to American sovereignty and jurisdiction. In the 1930s and early 1940s anti-internationalist sovereigntists helped lead the resistance to entrance into WWII on the side of the allied “united nations.” Instead, they supported the anti-internationalist Franco’s nationalist insurgency, and the anti-communist and hyper-nationalist regimes of Italy, and Germany. In the post-WWII years, with the birth of the United Nations and the US leadership in that institution, sovereigntists felt the dangers of world government had arrived. They undertook a long war against the United Nations, its conventions, and public international law, trade and rights that it created.

One of the most important targets of sovereigntists were the Human Rights and Genocide Conventions, products, they believed, of the power of non-white nations within the UN, which they referred to as the “Afro-Asian bloc.” In the view of anti-internationalists, the UN’s covenants and agencies undermined the civilizing authority of white and Christian nations and their people by offering membership and influence to non-white states and to movements and states who opposed imperialism.

These concerns drew the movement into new areas of foreign policy activism, including the Panama Canal.

Like the many countries with histories of imperial domination, Panama embraced the politics of decolonization and self-determination that global South countries carried with them into the UN. In the 1950s and 1960s, Panamanians invoked UN charters and the World Court’s rules on disputed territories to challenge US authority over the canal. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson agreed to cede bits of symbolic and real governance over the canal. Panamanians convinced other recently decolonized nations to pressure the United Nations to study Panamanian claims to the territory. The anti-internationalists in the sovereigntist movement called out what they saw as an internationalist plot to steal the canal, which, in their words, was “as much a part of the US as Florida or Alaska.” They began a political campaign to raise awareness about the danger of the UN and internationalist ideologies to America’s control of the canal. As American administrations slowly granted greater authority to the Panamanians, the movement to protect the canal grew. 

But Panamanians thwarted that movement. In 1973 Panamanian military leader Omar Torrijos secured the commitment of the UN Security Council to meet for a hearing on the canal in Panama City, abutting the Canal Zone: they agreed to investigate the status of the zone as an “occupied territory” of Panama by the United States. The UN hearing added to Panamanians’ local pressure, and in 1974, Henry Kissinger reopened ongoing talks with the Torrijos government to negotiate a treaty that began a process of granting Panamanian control over the canal. With that move, the array of longtime allies in veterans organizations and patriotic groups were joined by influential “new conservatives” like the Conservative Caucus and Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan. The final canal fight that ensued during the congressional debate over the treaty in 1977 and 1978 popularized sovereignty politics and anti-internationalism, shaping Reagan’s nationalist appeal, pushing both him and the Republican party toward a more anti-internationalist perspective.

That perspective remained significant on the American right throughout the 1980s, as Reagan pulled out of the UNESCO treaty, and found renewed life in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War, the demise of the Soviet threat, and the emergence of the so-called “New World Order” left US-led internationalism triumphant.  Sovereigntists recoiled at pledging US troops to UN peacekeeping missions and the proliferation of global trade agreements, for example. For sovereigntists in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, anti-internationalist politics appeared more important than ever.

No wonder, then, that sovereignty politics have reemerged with Trump through, in part, his claims on the Panama Canal. Few believe Trump will actually retake control of the Panama Canal, but sovereigntists in his administration will nevertheless pursue many other features of the century-long anti-internationalist, sovereigntist agenda. Judging by their own statements in Project 2025, they will seek withdrawal from additional international agreements and organizations, as they have already with the World Health Organization. They are also likely to seek to weaken and destabilize NATO and the European Union. And they will likely encourage other right-wing governments and parties in Europe and Israel, among others, themselves hostile to internationalism, to seek their own withdrawals. As a result, the post-WWII internationalist order may face a crisis not seen since the birth of American sovereignty politics in 1919.

About the Author

Jennifer Mittelstadt is professor of History at Rutgers University (USA).

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