With anti-US rallies on the streets and the star-spangled banner in flames, Panama hasn’t taken well to President Donald Trump’s vow to repossess its famous canal.

Since Trump’s surprising proclamation, Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino has been doing a delicate balancing act, trying to appease the new US administration while containing domestic furor over its expansionist demands. Public disagreements on the canal transits of US government vessels are just one sign of how hard it is for Mulino to please both sides.

The Panama episode billboards the new strategy toward Latin America taking shape in Trump 2.0’s first weeks: The administration is abandoning the idea of Pan-Americanism, according to which the US tried to foster more cooperation and rules-based diplomacy even while still acting as the hegemon.

Trump has gained some populist allies in the region he didn’t have when he took office in 2017, most notably Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Chile, Colombia and Brazil may vote in right-wing governments within the next 20 months. He also has appointed the first Latino secretary of state. But the harshness of his take-it-or-leave-it approach will not only negate these advantages, but also give new force to anti-Americanism.

Trump’s insistence on blaming the region for US problems -- illegal migration, drug trafficking, trade imbalances or missed investments -- has already brought far-reaching consequences: the cancellation of foreign aid, the threat of tariffs, a reversal of efforts to curb US bribery abroad and the blatant betrayal of Venezuelan refugees in the US by ending their humanitarian parole. As Trump bluntly told reporters asking about Latin America recently, “We don’t need them. They need us.”

This strongman strategy may play well with US voters eager for quick fixes. But not so much with America’s neighbors, many of whose governments will likely pursue efforts at containment or closer alliances with more accommodating and generous countries (read China, already South America’s largest trading partner).

Americans have often failed to reckon with the roots of Latin America’s long-standing grievances. When Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries toppled a corrupt and tyrannical US-backed government, for instance, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was quick to denounce and dismiss him as a “madman.”

Earlier, the CIA had described the government of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz, unseated by the US in 1954, as “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the ‘Banana Republic.’” Those are just a few of the all too many events that explain why the region’s anti-Americanism isn’t irrational.

But suspicion and enmity toward the colossus to the north also coexist with an abiding appreciation for the value of good ties. As the historian Eric Zolov from Stony Brook University argues, Pan-Americanism has always been twinned with a US tendency to aggressively advance its interests, jumbling the country’s republican principles with its imperial impulses.

“I don’t see these things as necessarily inconsistent,” Zolov told me. “The US is very integrated with Latin America and the idea of being a good neighbor is already deeply embedded in our DNA. At the same time, we have lots of examples of serving our selfish interest. There has always been a back and forth.” Witness a 2023 study by Pew Research that shows strong pro-US opinions in the region’s three largest economies after a decline in perceptions during Trump’s first mandate.

The drawbacks of Trump’s all-stick, no-carrot strategy are unequivocal. Consider the disdain for his supposed partners: Panama is a close US ally and a key player in its strategy to stop illegal migration — yet the president’s sudden obsession with the canal has poisoned the relationship with the conservative, pro-business Mulino from the start.

Trump has declined to exempt Argentina from the incoming 25 percent tariffs on steel despite his rapport with Milei; the president justified the measure by saying the US has a “little deficit” with the South American nation — even as US data showed a $2 billion goods surplus with Argentina last year. And remember that during last year’s campaign, Trump criticized Bukele for “sending their murderers to the United States.”

Trump’s first term provides evidence of how unilateral bullying can backfire. In 2020, he succeeded in installing Mauricio Claver-Carone as head of the Inter-American Development Bank, breaking the long-standing tradition of a Latin American leading the region’s top development bank and creating a serious rift. Even the Brazilian government of Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump supporter, supported the decision to fire Claver-Carone two years later.

But that lesson seems to have been lost. Claver-Carone is now back at the White House as Trump’s special envoy for Latin America and calls the administration’s approach to the region “non-imperialistic expansionism.”

He lost me after “non.”Trump seems to have misread Machiavelli’s advice that it is better to be feared than to be loved, forgetting that the Italian also urged princes not to overdo it: “While a ruler can’t expect to inspire love when making himself feared, he must avoid arousing hatred. Actually, being feared is perfectly compatible with not being hated.”

Machiavelli went on: “Above all, he mustn’t seize other people’s property. A man will sooner forget the death of his father than the loss of his inheritance.”

Words to the wise when it comes to the Panama Canal.

Juan Pablo Spinetto

Juan Pablo Spinetto is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin American business, economic affairs and politics. The views expressed here are the writer's own. -- Ed.

(Tribune Content Agency)


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