At a time of encroachment by Communist China in Latin America, President-elect Trump’s call to wrest back control of the Panama Canal offers an opportunity to reassert America’s proper role in the region. Since the days of President Monroe, after all, the Western Hemisphere is supposed to be off limits to foreign intrusions. Trump, pointing to China, is warning that the canal is a “vital national asset” that can fall into the “wrong hands.”

Beijing, the Guardian newspaper reports, already has control — via a Hong Kong corporation — of two ports out of the five ocean harbors that adjoin the canal. That kind of infiltration by the Communist mandarins is echoed across the hemisphere, with a Chinese-built “megaport” in Peru promising to “transform regional trade,” as the Financial Times puts it, and Colombia forging a “strategic partnership” with Beijing, our Jim Brooke reports. 

Even closer to home, Beijing is making substantial investments south of the Rio Grande in an effort to elude potential tariff threats by Trump. Chinese corporations — which under Beijing’s autocracy are inseparable from the ruling party — are boosting manufacturing in Mexico, forging deep supply chain links, and building close trade ties. It all adds up, the FT’s Michael Stott writes, to “the eclipse of the US by China in Latin America.”

Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, insists that his country has control of the canal. “Every square metre of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zones is part of Panama, and it will continue to be,” he said on Sunday in response to the President-elect’s concerns. For how long can that pledge be relied upon, though? It’s no wonder that the Trump has his eye on the canal. Plus, too, the canal’s management is charging what Trump sees as exorbitant tolls. 

“We’re being ripped off at the Panama Canal,” Trump says, calling the fees “ridiculous, highly unfair” and lamenting that America “foolishly gave it away.” Indeed, it’s hard to grasp why the canal was ever ceded. The waterway was a triumph of American ingenuity and a signal of its arrival as a global power. When it opened in 1914, a Sun editorial hailed it as “the most stupendous engineering operation ever undertaken by nation or man.”

The opening of the link between two oceans, the Sun added, “is the greatest victory of peace recorded in any volume of history; and it has been won by the Army of the United States.” The Sun went on to say, “the canal has been dug by the most capable and responsible and honest contractor and organizer of effort on earth, Uncle Sam himself.” As a result, “the dream of four hundred years has been realized, with unparalleled efficiency and celerity.”

Quoth the Sun: “It is an American canal, forever to be wholly under the control of the United States, alike in peace and war.” On that head, the Sun quoted President Roosevelt, who had “early joined the Sun in pointing out” that American control was, as TR put it, “vital no less from the standpoint of our sea power than from the standpoint of the Monroe Doctrine.” That wisdom was ignored by President Carter and the Democrats some 63 years later.

Mr. Carter’s surrender of the canal — via, in 1977, a treaty — was abetted by Congressional Democrats. They reflected the “malaise” that characterized Mr. Carter’s leadership and that the voters repudiated in 1980 by electing President Reagan. By that point, the Panama Canal Zone was dissolved. Full control of the canal went to Panama in 1999. That’s the background leading Trump to aver that “this complete rip-off of our country will immediately stop.”

The president-elect’s focus on the canal marks the risks posed by Beijing’s influence campaign across Latin America — and a logical extension of his campaign vow to put America’s interests first on foreign policy, especially in our hemisphere. The danger of inaction suggests that if America fails to secure the canal it built, the waterway — and the larger region — is at risk of falling under the sway, whether de jure or de facto, of the Chinese communists.