This is not the first time that Daniel Runde, senior executive of the Center for International Strategic Studies, has written about the Panama Canal. He did so in 2011 when he analyzed the impact of the expansion of the road. In 2017, he described the exchange of messages between President Donald Trump and Panamanian Juan Carlos Varela, when the former was proud of the authorship of building the road, its relevance today and its leading role in the logistics of world trade. Recently, Fox News interviewed Runde and the report made headlines in local media.
On this occasion, it highlights the way in which the United States fits China into the context of contemporary geopolitics, its commercial power in Panama, especially on the banks of the Canal. For the Pentagon, Chinese influence in the Panama Canal is seen as an “urgent matter of national security.
The urgent issue is part of China’s commercial penetration into the isthmus since 2017, when the Varela government began diplomatic relations with China and cut off with Taiwan. For Americans, the fact that Panama never told them that it intended to open the doors to its biggest commercial competitor, was perceived as a betrayal of a historical partner. For China, it was the opening of hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure works contracts awarded to Chinese companies on the banks of the Canal, in addition to the signing of about twenty agreements in different areas (2018) with the historic visit to Panama between the president of the Asian giant, Xi Jinping and Varela.