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 administration declined to comment on private meetings or conversations. The Embassy of Panama did not return a request for comment. All of Washington, meanwhile, remains abuzz, if not baffled, by an emerging Trump doctrine that calls for American control of not just the Panama Canal but also the annexation of Canada and Greenland.

The threat to retake the canal came out of the blue. It was not without precedent, as some have reported.

Trump has long been fascinated with its construction, and during his first term, he pointed to the Panama Canal at least half a dozen times as a symbol of national pride, ranking it on par with the moon landing and the defeat of fascism. But more recently, he shocked the world when he wrote on his social media website, Truth Social, that the Panama Canal was charging American commercial and naval vessels “exorbitant prices and rates of passage” and floated the idea of seizing its control. The year prior, as a candidate in the Republican primary and during an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump bemoaned how “China now controls the Panama Canal.”

After France tried and failed in the early 20^th century, it was the United States that built the canal that connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean. The waterway remained under U.S. control until, in 1977, the late President Jimmy Carter signed the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which mandated permanent neutrality of the canal and turned over management to Panama in 2000. Even before Trump rattled the saber, increased Chinese involvement in the region rang alarm bells in Washington that Beijing may use its influence to undermine U.S. interest in the region.

Ted Piccone, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served in the Clinton administration, warned in August 2020 amidst an ongoing trade war that China could use its influence over Panama to “squeeze the United States out of important not only markets but out of important security zones.”

Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. Laura J. Richardson, commander of U.S. Southern Command, identified Chinese investment in the region as “a serious threat” before identifying, in particular, the “state-owned enterprises that are along either side of the Panama Canal.”

Richardson added that, in the case of a national emergency, she had “no doubt” in the ability of Panama and the U.S. to defend the canal. That has done little to ease the mind of the president-elect, however.

“Trump was very much aware of it, and we did a lot to push back on it,” Alexander Gray, who served as chief of staff on the Trump White House National Security Council, said of increased Chinese influence in Panama, calling it “a horrible, but great and illustrative, example of what happens when you just decide your strategic interests are on the other side of the globe, not in your own hemisphere.”

The president-elect seems to be sketching out a doctrine in real time, fleshing out a foreign policy more focused on a closer sphere of influence than the world over. His nominations could be a signal of a new prioritized geography. He named Leandro Rizzuto Jr. to be his ambassador to the Organization of American States weeks before picking others for European missions.

“What he’s really talking about is the Western Hemisphere First, and America’s interest in the Western Hemisphere,” Gray said, likening the approach to a revamped version of “John Quincy Adams’ 19^th-century vision of foreign policy that we abandoned over the years.”

That kind of emphasis on a theater closer to home is necessary, argued Tuberville, considering Chinese aggression. “They’re buying up things right and left all over the world,” the senator said. “It’s time that we started spreading our wings and get in that game also.”

But is military expansion actually on the table as Trump warned, or is Trump engaged in public bravado to strengthen his diplomatic hand? Gray does not believe an invasion of Panama is imminent. His interpretation is instead that the president-elect is signaling that if the canal continues to be “subverted” in a way that harms U.S. national security, “we have to leave every option on the table to stop a threat.”

Explained Tuberville, “You’ve got to understand President Trump’s a deal maker. He’s always been that; it’s what he’s done for a living, building things, trading things, working deals all over the world. And this is no different.”

For their part, the government in Panama has no interest in making a deal. Mulino bristled at such talk, saying in a statement that “every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent area belong to Panama” and that the nation’s sovereignty was “not negotiable.” The leader of the Panama Canal Authority, Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, told the Wall Street Journal that “the accusations that China is running the Canal are unfounded” before adding that under the 1977 treaty negotiated by the late President Jimmy Carter, “we cannot discriminate for the Chinese, or the Americans, or anyone else.”

Republicans have complained for decades that Carter delivered a raw deal. Eager to rectify what they see as a strategic blunder, House Republicans have already drafted legislation to authorize the president to purchase the canal and return it to U.S. control. The effort is not likely to attract much bipartisan support. But while Democrats are already rolling their eyes at Trump’s prescription for expansion, many security-minded Democrats have expressed concern over Chinese meddling in the region.

Before the House Select Committee on China last May, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois pointed to the Panama Canal and asked a testifying expert whether, in a potential conflict over Taiwan, “the CCP could use its control of these entry ports to potentially delay American civilian and military shipping. Isn’t that right?” Daniel Runde, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, replied, “Ranking member, I share your concern.”

Other Democrats, like freshly minted Michigan Sen. Elise Slotkin, have expressed similar concerns. While a member of the House in 2023, Slotkin said in committee that China was “attempting to complete that encirclement with coercions in Honduras and Panama, to control the Panama Canal.”

None of this escaped the attention of the Biden administration either. The president dispatched Daleep Singh, his deputy National Security Advisor, to Panama in October 2021 to advance Build Back Better World, an infrastructure program widely seen as a counterweight to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

Tuberville, who has repeatedly raised the alarm over the Panama Canal, rejected the idea that Trump was playing politics. He noted that a number of Democrats share his concerns. “It’s not bipartisan,” he said matter-of-factly. “It is an American concern.”