The situation in the Panama Canal is worse than we thought. Not only does a Chinese company control container ports at each end of the waterway, but a Chinese construction battalion is slowly building a bridge right across the middle.
How slowly? Well, the bridge won’t be completed until 2027 and Sen. Ted Cruz thinks he knows why.
As Cruz, who is chairman of the Commerce Committee, noted at a hearing this week, “the partially-completed bridge gives China the ability to block the canal without warning…This situation poses acute risks to US national security.”
What kind of risks?
Imagine that China announces a blockade of Taiwan and that we want to surge forces from the Atlantic into the Pacific to counter it.
A US aircraft carrier is midway through the canal, passing under China’s bridge when, without warning, the unfinished bridge collapses, crushing the ship.
China pretends it’s an accident, offering its condolences to the families of the thousands of US sailors who lost their lives. Unable to break the blockade on its own, the island of Taiwan capitulates two months later, and the largest chip-manufacturing factory in the world falls into China’s hands.
The last administration turned a blind eye to these kinds of national security risks. Joe Biden was literally asleep on a Delaware beach for much of his presidency. Or perhaps he really was, as many believe, the Manchurian Candidate all along.
Whatever the case may be, China has had four long years to run riot over the world.
While Biden slept, China crushed the Democracy Movement in Hong Kong and locked up its leading dissident, Jimmy Lai.
It nibbled away at the territory of neighboring states like Bhutan and India, built a naval base in Cambodia, and encouraged North Korea’s Kim Jong-un to continue his campaign of missile intimidation. Just last week Little Rocket Man, as Trump labeled him, fired off another round of cruise missiles.
China has also embarked upon a new kind of “grey zone” warfare, with its ships severing undersea communications cables in the Baltic Sea and, even more worrisomely, around Taiwan and its offshore islands, in what may be a prelude to an actual blockade.
At the same time, Beijing has moved into the South Pacific in a big way, signing a “security pact” with the Solomon Islands, and seeking to rebuild a strategic World War II airfield in Kiribati, just 1,500 miles from Hawaii.
Even closer to US soil, China has declared itself to be a “near-Arctic power,” and has built a fleet of Arctic icebreakers; it’s even eyeing Greenland. Yes, that Greenland.
It is impossible to overstate how disruptive China has been over the past four years. China today is the chaos agent lurking behind every major world conflict.
Prior to invading Ukraine in late February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin traveled to Beijing to seek Xi Jinping’s support.
The two entered into a quasi-military alliance.
The invasion of Ukraine soon followed.
Without China’s electronic equipment, Hamas would not have been able to plan and execute a stealth attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
The cyber attacks that reduced Israel’s response time to the incursion were also China’s handiwork.
Without China’s aid to Iran’s ballistic missile program — which began in the 1990s — and its financial support in the form of oil purchases, Tehran’s ayatollahs would not have been able to attack Israel.
It is unlikely that Kim Jong-un would have sent North Korean munitions, artillery, and troops to aid Russia’s flailing ground campaign in Ukraine without a green light from Beijing.
Biden left the White House on Jan. 20 with the world closer to World War III than we have been since the 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis. The war in Ukraine continues to rage on, the Middle East is a tinderbox and the peaceful island democracy of Taiwan is under imminent threat of invasion.
Biden’s successor, having completed his on-the-job training during his first term in office, is clearly capable of ending this chaos and reining in the actor behind it.
It is clear from Trump’s first two weeks that his first priority is to secure the American homeland. That’s why we are securing our borders, and building our own missile defense shield, an American Iron Dome, named after Israel’s spectacularly successful prototype.
That’s why we will be keeping China out of Greenland. And that’s why, when all is said and done, we may take back the Panama Canal.
In 1979, the late President Jimmy Carter made two strategic blunders that continue to haunt us today. The first was to give away, in a gush of globalist empathy, the Panama Canal to the tiny country that surrounds it.
The second was to extend diplomatic recognition to China, thus legitimizing a regime that today poses a great danger to the United States and our allies, not least because of its commanding position on that same canal.
I suggest that, as we resecure the Panama Canal, we rename it in honor of the Americans who died constructing this vital waterway: It should henceforth be called the American Canal.
A senior CCP official just warned our new secretary of state that “America better behave itself or else.” Actually it is China that “had better behave itself.” There’s a new sheriff in town.
Steven W. Mosher is the president of the Population Research Institute and the author of “The Devil and Communist China”
