His fascination is nothing new.

“The Panama Canal is doing quite well,” Donald Trump beamed in June 2017 during one of his earliest meetings with another world leader. “I think we did a good job building it.” Then-President Juan Carlos Varela, seated to his right in the Oval Office, sheepishly protested that construction occurred “one hundred years ago.”

Panama cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan that week in favor of establishing relations directly with China. The next year, despite U.S. warnings about Chinese “predatory economic activity,” Panama became the first Latin American country to join Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative, a sweeping infrastructure program meant to extend the influence of the Chinese Communist Party across the globe. The two seaports on either side of the state-run Panama Canal are managed by a Hong Kong-based company.

This grated the former president then, and the fact that the symbol of American engineering and ingenuity is now under the influence of China infuriates the president-elect. He has called for the U.S. to retake control of the canal and do it by force if necessary.

“They laugh at us because they think we’re stupid,” Trump said of the international parties involved, adding during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that the fate of “the Panama Canal is under discussion” with the Panamanians. According to Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, those talks are now being led by one of the president-elect’s most trusted aids.

A confidant of Trump and a senator from a coastal state with significant shipping interest, Tuberville has cultivated close ties with the new administration of Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino and even attended his inauguration in person last July.

“The people I know down there were reaching out after President Trump got elected,” he told RealClearPolitics in an interview, asking, “Can you get President Trump and our president together?” A meeting isn’t on the books yet. “President Trump’s been real busy,” Tuberville explained, “but passed it on to Stephen Miller, who’s very much into this.”

A spokeswoman for the incoming........

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