President-elect Donald Trump’s recent lament that the United States ceded control of the Panama Canal to Panama under the Carter administration is both strategically sound and historically resonant. Trump, the most consequential conservative president since Ronald Reagan, shares with the Gipper both an instinctual understanding of U.S. national interests and, more specifically, a healthy skepticism about the logic of ceding the American-built canal.

Trump’s recent comments echo closely those of Reagan during the 1978 debate over the ratification of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties that ended U.S. sovereignty over the canal. Reagan, preparing to challenge Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election, said he would “talk as long and as loud as I can against it” and warned presciently that “I think that basically the world is not going to see this [giving away the canal] as a magnanimous gesture on our part, as the White House would have us believe.”

Like many of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives, Reagan’s persistent opposition to the cession of the canal earned him the derision of the foreign policy cognoscenti of his day. Even

© The National Interest