Former Navy SEAL and aerial firefighter, freshmen Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), stood by his colleague and former collegiate football coach, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), when the latter told conservative political pundit Larry Kudlow on his Fox Business show that “We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back.”
Note: Kudlow was Director of the National Economic Council during the first Trump Administration (2018 to 2021), and is vice chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank developing policies for the second Trump presidency.
Echoing President-elect Donald Trump, Tuberville said: “We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back. We’ve gotta do something because if we were to happen to go to war with China over Taiwan and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go 8 to 10,000 miles longer just to get things back to the war zone, if we had to go from the East Coast to China.”
Sen. Tommy Tuberville: “We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back. We’ve gotta do something because if we were to happen to go to war with China over Taiwan and they were to shut the Panama Canal down, we’d have to go 8 to 10,000 miles just to get things back to the war zone.” pic.twitter.com/zNyH7Rn7US
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 7, 2025
Tuberville’s comments are being mocked in some of the left-leaning spaces that remain on X, with comments like “Panama is in charge of the Panama Canal, not China. How would China shut down the canal? Also, we have planes.” And “we have over 8,500 miles of water on the west coast with a direct line to the Pacific Ocean.”
[NOTE: As Reuters reported in December, “China does not control or administer the canal, but a subsidiary of Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison Holdings has long managed two ports located on the canal’s Caribbean and Pacific entrances.”]
Trump wrote on Truth Social: “[The Panama Canal] was not given for the benefit of others, but merely as a token of cooperation with us and Panama. If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full, and without question. To the Officials of Panama, please be guided accordingly!”
Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) has also backed Trump’s idea, asserting — like Tuberville — that the Canal should not been given to Panama in the first place because of its “strategic importance.”
Others, however are criticizing Trump’s idea of “taking back” the Panama Canal as it appears to contradict the whole “America First” and “no more wars” pledge from his campaign. “Fix your own backyard first,” writes one commenter, evidently more focused on the immigration issues and grocery prices that Trump chiefly campaigned on.
One Panama “expat whisperer” responding to Fleischmann pointed out that the Panama Canal Trump wants returned isn’t the same Panama Canal the U.S. delivered. Instead it is the product of a $5.25 billion infrastructure expansion project completed in 2016:
The “new” canal was not even built by the United States: the recent expansion of the Panama Canal, known as the Panama Canal Expansion Project or the Third Set of Locks, was carried out by an international consortium called Grupo Unidos por el Canal (GUPC).
This group included companies from several countries: – Sacyr (Spain) – Salini Impregilo (Italy) – Jan De Nul (Belgium) – CUSA (Panama).
The project was completed in 2016, adding a new set of locks (Aguaclara on the Atlantic side and Cocolí on the Pacific side), which doubled the Canal’s capacity. This allows it to accommodate much larger ships, known as Neopanamax vessels, essential for modern global trade.
The project was managed by the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), an entirely Panamanian organization, ensuring that the entire expansion remained under Panamanian sovereignty.