Imperialist Fantasy: Historian Greg Grandin on Trump Threat to Retake Panama Canal, Invade Mexico

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This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman.

We turn now to look at how President-elect Trump has threatened to retake the Panama Canal. The United States controlled the waterway after its completion in the early 20th century. But in 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed a landmark treaty to give Panama control of the canal, which, by providing a path through Central America, revolutionized maritime shipping. During a speech in Arizona Sunday, Trump threatened to retake the canal.

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP: If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question.

AMY GOODMAN: Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino rejected Trump’s threat in a video he posted online.

PRESIDENT JOSÉ RAÚL MULINO: [translated] I want to express that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent areas belong to Panama and will continue to belong to Panama. The sovereignty and independence of our country are not negotiable.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Trump announced he’s picking Trump loyalist, local official Kevin Marino Cabrera from Miami to serve as U.S. ambassador to Panama.

For more on this and Trump’s vow to maybe also annex Canada, as he continually to refers to “Governor Trudeau,” and even a possible soft invasion of Mexico, we’re joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin, history professor at Yale University, his recent op-ed in The New York Times headlined “The Republicans Who Want to Invade Mexico.” His forthcoming book, America, América: A New History of the New World.

Thanks for joining us, Professor Grandin. First, your response to Panama?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, Panama is interesting. I mean, I think there’s a lot of things going on. Obviously, Trump is not president yet, and he’s sending out messages that are meant to set a tone. In some ways, it’s classic Trump. He’s saber-rattling about these fantasies about taking back the canal. But I think the real kind of prosaic reason why he’s doing that is to place, you know, single pressure on Panama to clamp down on immigration, and particularly to close down the Darién Gap. Last year, I believe the numbers are quite off the charts. Something like 400,000 migrants traipsed through the very narrow jungle Darién Gap as part of the migration into the United States. And by placing the pressure on Panama about the canal, this is Trump’s way of, you know, bait and switch, in some ways.

But I think there are other things also going on. In some ways, it’s distraction. The more we talk about Greenland, the more we talk about Canada and “Governor Trudeau,” and the more we talk about taking back the Panama Canal, the less we’re talking about Syria or Gaza or, you know, these other hot spots that require significant attention and real diplomacy, rather than this kind of circus act.

But I also think that it also — it speaks to this signal shift in the global order. I think that, you know, the liberal — the old liberal order, multilateral order, that Trump stands apart and above from and has pledged to overthrow, you know, it presided over untold number of hypocrisies and atrocities. But at least the premise that it was founded on was that nations were to cooperate with each other to create a peaceful world, and hence diplomatic protocol. Trump, by just talking about taking the canal or taking Greenland or turning Canada into the 51st state, is really harkening back to a world where the doctrine of conquest still reigned, you know, where the presumption wasn’t cooperation. The presumption was rivalry, competition and domination, in which smaller nations suffer what they must and bigger nations do what they will.

And I think that, you know, this is classic — this is classic Trump. There’s no way the United States is going to fill out greater America. This is red meat for the Trump base. If you go to Twitter, you can see all of these MAGA maps in which greater America is filled out from Greenland down to Panama. And it’s a fantasy. There is not going to be a kind of return to territorial annexation in any significant way. I mean, the United States is not Israel, right? In Israel, there is a Greater Israel actually being created. In the United States, it exists more in the kind of fantasy life of his rank and file. And I think that some of that is what is going on.

And let me just add, it’s Panama. Panama is one of the largest offshore money-laundering shelters in the world. By some accounts, some $7 trillion exists in these offshore accounts. And if he really wanted to make America great again, he would go after not the Panama Canal or worry about immigration, he would shut down — he would shut down the ability of these offshore financing to function, and he would tax that money. And then we’d have high-speed trains. We’d have healthcare. We’d have a nation, as he likes to put it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, just as we talked about Greenland and China and the U.S. interest in Greenland, what about the Panama Canal and the possibility of a larger canal being built through Nicaragua, and the role of China versus the U.S.? Is Trump seeing it in this context?

GREG GRANDIN: I think, I mean, obviously, Latin America and its relationship with China is always a geostrategic concern for national security types. And it has been, and has been for quite a while. And in terms of the Panama Canal in particular, there are alternatives on the table. Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico has talked about creating an interoceanic corridor, a combination of roadways and trains, in that thin kind of waistband area of Mexico, that would compete with the Panama Canal. Nicaragua, of course, is run by a degraded version of the Sandinistas, but they’ve been in talks with China. But this has been going on for decades, so it’s unclear how real they were.

The thing about building alternatives to the Panama Canal is that this happens whenever — it’s been going on for quite a long time, for at least a century, because, of course, the problem with the Panama Canal, it’s not a — it’s a lock canal. It’s not a sea level canal. So it takes a long time to fill up the locks, bring them down, bring the ship across. And that’s why the tariffs are so high. That’s why the fees are so high. It’s an enormous operation. So there’s been a dream of a sea level canal for over a century. And maybe the will there is to build it either in Mexico or Nicaragua, but, you know, it’s not anything I would hold my breath for, waiting to see happen. We’d probably have high-speed trains in the United States before that happened.

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Trump’s pick for the ambassador to Mexico is Ron Johnson, whose military career began in Panama. In the '80s, he was stationed in El Salvador as one of 55 U.S. military advisers as the Salvadoran military and paramilitaries were killing thousands of Salvadorans. He was a specialist in covert operations, became a member of the elite U.S. Special Forces, informally known as the Green Berets, a highly selective unit that also included figures like Trump's pick for national security adviser, Michael Waltz. He has pushed for the U.S. also invading Mexico, Greg, as we wrap up.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, these are bad signs. Ron Johnson just brings us back to Iran-Contra, I mean, right into the heart of it. I mean, he was one of the so-called 55 military advisers on the ground in El Salvador while the United States was helping El Salvador build a death squad state. I mean, he’s got — and then he had a career in the Green Berets and onward to the CIA. He’s been — you know, he’s seen some things. And to name him ambassador to Mexico is, again, sending a strong signal.

Again, Mexico is Mexico. It’s stubborn. It has a strong commitment to sovereignty. On the other hand, it’s poor, and it needs capital, and the United States is the largest trading partner. Claudia Sheinbaum seems to be very astute in not — you know, where we see obsequiousness on the part of Justin Trudeau, Sheinbaum has come back quite strongly, at least rhetorically, on Trump. But on the other hand, Mexico has cooperated with the United States on all sorts of things having to do with migration, and including helping the United States enforce a hard line on migration. I imagine that’s going to continue, no matter what the rhetoric of Sheinbaum. But Mexico does have a — has a much stronger commitment to the idea of sovereignty because of the history, where, you know, you started talking about territorial annexation. I mean, a third of Mexico was lost to the United States. Texas was lost to the United States. The United States almost took the Yucatán in 1948 along with Texas — 1848, along with Texas. So, that history is there.

And, of course, the people that Trump has put in, Marco Rubio as secretary of state, Ron Johnson, Mike Waltz, I mean, they might as well move the State Department down to Mar-a-Lago or down to Tampa. I mean, it’s basically a Florida-based operation, which suggests that we’re going to see a lot of interesting rivalries or a lot of interesting conflicts with Latin America, which will not necessarily be — which might reveal some big cleavages, because one of the things that the mathematic —

AMY GOODMAN: We just have 20 seconds, Greg.

GREG GRANDIN: OK. One of the things that the Trump people want to do is build an alliance with right-wing Latin Americans. And you ain’t gonna do that by threatening to take back the Panama Canal.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, even The Wall Street Journal editorial page, well known for its conservatism, said, “Trump, you did not campaign on this issue. Where is it coming from?” Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and professor of history at Yale University. We’ll link your New York Times op-ed headlined “The Republicans Who Want to Invade Mexico.” We’ll also link to Tracy Wilkerson’s piece in The New York Times — Tracy Wilkinson’s Los Angeles Times piece about Ron Johnson.

Next up, we talk with longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist Roger McNamee, author of Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, about the tech oligarchs. Back in 20 seconds.

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