After weeks of Donald Trump’s threats to “take back” the Panama Canal, the White House has ordered the military to come up with an assortment of plans to make the president’s imperial fantasy a reality. According to NBC News, which first reported on the directive, the plans range from increasing military partnership with Panama to forcefully seizing the canal.

This news came just days after Trump delivered a boastful message to Congress on March 4. “My administration will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it,” he gloated, adding that “just today a large American company announced they are buying both ports around the Panama Canal.”

That “large American company” — BlackRock — may be the most powerful firm on Wall Street.

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager and the poster child of the post-2008 concentration of corporate ownership into the hands of a small group of giant companies offering low-fee index funds. Recently, BlackRock has started shifting toward more investment in “alternative” private markets, including infrastructure. The deal that Trump heralded was a reference to BlackRock’s acquisition, announced hours before his speech, of two critical ports on either side of the Panama Canal, along with dozens of other ports located across the world.

For Trump, the Panama Canal has become a flashpoint for the assertion of U.S. power as he escalates geopolitical pressure on China. BlackRock’s acquisition is a coup for the firm, but it also signals that U.S. corporations, and finance capital especially, remain an arm for the projection of U.S. influence in the global imperial struggle for control over critical resources and infrastructure. Trump’s bullying campaigns will aim to pressure concessions that open up space for U.S. corporations to step in and capitalize, taking control over assets while boxing out rivals.

“There’s been a shift toward containing China, and American imperial interests have been defined more narrowly as defense of particularly American capitalists against others,” Stephen Maher, an economics professor at SUNY Cortland, told Truthout. “So control over the strategic ports by BlackRock is no doubt seen in geopolitical terms as a victory in this geopolitical contestation with China.”

On March 4, the announcement came that BlackRock, leading a group that included Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a BlackRock subsidiary, and Terminal Investment Limited, a global ports operator owned by the Italian billionaire Aponte family, had struck an agreement to acquire a huge portfolio of ports from the Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison, owned by the billionaire Li family, for $22.8 billion.

The acquisition includes both the Balboa and Cristóbal ports, located on opposite sides of the Panama Canal. According to the Wall Street Journal, these two ports “handled 40 percent of all containers that crossed the waterway last year.”

The agreement also stated that BlackRock’s consortium would acquire a portfolio of 43 ports with 199 berths across 23 countries, placing a U.S. investment firm atop a global network of ports that stretches from Australia to Egypt, Mexico to Poland, and Thailand to Pakistan.

With this single deal, over 40 ports across the globe, including the two critical Panama Canal ports, will now come under the control of the most powerful financial firm in the U.S. When combined with its current port holdings, says the Wall Street Journal, BlackRock and its partners “would operate about 100 ports around the world after the deal closes.”

This comes as BlackRock already oversees a record $11.6 trillion in assets, equal to around the combined GDP of Japan, India and Brazil.

BlackRock ascended in the financial world by offering clients low-fee index funds, which are funds whose investments track stock and bond markets indexes. What this means, essentially, is that an investment in a single index fund — for example, BlackRock’s iShares S&P 500 Index Fund — is actually an investment in hundreds of different stocks or bonds.

This gave BlackRock, along with other big asset management firms like Vanguard and State Street, control over huge ownership shares of virtually every public corporation. One study noted that these firms together were the

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