However, the truth is much more complicated. The removal of a Chinese-linked operator from the world’s most strategic waterway is best understood as a signature achievement of the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.” While the Trump administration’s more bellicose maneuvers in Venezuela and Cuba dominate international headlines, the quiet, surgical reclamation of the Panama Canal via lawfare demonstrates that the U.S. has more sophisticated tools at its disposal for asserting its hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.

For nearly a century, the United States ruled the Panama Canal as its own “sovereign” territory.

The Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty granted the U.S. “all the rights, power, and authority” to manage the so-called Canal Zone, a power the U.S. famously leveraged to collect taxes on all foreign capital that passed through it. While the 1977 Torrijos-Carter Treaties provided a legal mechanism for returning the territory to Panama, they also granted the United States the permanent right to “defend the canal against any threat to the regime of neutrality,” a dangerous carve-out given that the U.S. never totally relinquished the idea that the Canal was a crucial part of its own infrastructure in the region. Washington’s definition of “neutrality” has always been subject to the whims of its strategic desires.

The State Department’s maneuvering leading up to the ruling suggests that the U.S. still views the Panama Canal as a colonial enclave. The purge of CK Hutchison from the Panama Canal is a case study in the modern mechanics of imperialism. As the Panamanian elite celebrate their “legal victory,” they may soon find that in the era of the “Donroe Doctrine,” the only laws that truly hold weight are the ones written by the White House.

https://nacla.org/lawfare-diplomacy-how-the-u-s-bullied-its-way-back-into-the-panama-canal/