***Today is a return to the doctors and their meetings with me…..I do not know how long this will be so today may be a short posting day.***

Our new power broker has made several foreign policy statements and I have tried to look behind them to see just what the thing is all about……

I have done the Greenland thing and the annexing of Canada (a possibility)…and now the Panama bluster….

“When it comes to the [Panama] Canal,” the future president intoned, “we built it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and … we are going to keep it!”

No, not incoming President Donald Trump. That was Ronald Reagan, the former California governor who in 1976 challenged incumbent Gerald Ford for the Republican presidential nomination.

After losing a string of early primaries, Reagan stumbled upon a fringe issue that came to animate his conservative base and reignited his flailing campaign. It wasn’t quite enough to put him over the edge against Ford, but it helped him defeat Jimmy Carter four years later.

From 1976 to 1978, the future of the Panama Canal — specifically, whether it should remain under U.S. sovereignty or revert to Panamanian control — proved an unusually potent campaign issue, tipping both presidential primaries and congressional races in states as far and wide as Colorado, New Hampshire and Idaho, places nowhere near Central America and with no direct stake in who owned the storied waterway that connects the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

With Trump now demanding that Panama cede the canal back to the United States, and threatening to use military force if the Panamanian government refuses his demand, the topic is back in the news. And it’s no less strange than it was almost 40 years ago.

As was the case then, most Americans today really don’t care. A recent YouGov poll found that 36 percent of voters support Trump’s territorial and expansionist aspirations; 36 percent oppose them; and 29 percent don’t have a point of view either way.

But much as Reagan did before him, Trump has seized on the canal as a symbol. In the 1970s, America was reeling from the Vietnam War, stagflation, oil shortages and, eventually, a hostage crisis in Iran. These overlapping crises left many people worried that the country was weak, no longer the master of its own destiny.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/11/trumps-bluster-panama-canal-00197624

The threat was the possible use of military force is a significant threat and I want to get this down before the swearing in and the news about this foreign policy threat is sidelined with all the pomp and ceremony of a coronation.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”