Word: waterways
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Ronald Reagan almost accidentally discovered, during his bid for the G.O.P. presidential nomination last year, that the canal aroused high passions. Coming so soon after the U.S. retreat from Viet Nam, the question of giving up the waterway became inextricably entangled with the matter of American strength and pride-of patriotism v. surrender. Yet for all the opposition, the pact has the backing of a very wide spectrum of informed opinion, including conservatives like Bill Buckley and John Wayne. Four successive Presidents-Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and now Jimmy Carter-have backed negotiations and pushed them along. Faults...
...could such a good cause get into so much trouble? The Panama Canal treaty, which gradually cedes U.S. control over the waterway to Panama by the year 2000, is nothing if not reasonable and conciliatory. It is a common-sensical solution to a nagging, decades-old problem-one that has damaged U.S. relations not with an enemy but with a relatively good neighbor. Yet opposition has grown so intense that while the treaty is expected to be approved by a plebiscite in Panama this week, it is still in considerable trouble in the U.S. Senate...
...helpful, either, to overemphasize the guilt factor in giving up the canal. To be sure, the U.S. acquired the canal territory in a grandly imperialistic manner in 1903, and the waterway remains one of the last, most prominent vestiges of the colonial era. As Senator S.I. Hayakawa put it, not altogether whimsically, "We stole it fair and square." But it can be argued that ever since the canal was opened for business in 1914, the U.S. has more than made up for its initial land grab. It has managed the canal in an openhanded manner, allowing access...
...course, it is still important, but not nearly so vital as it used to be. About 8% of U.S. international maritime trade passes through the waterway, much of it in non-American vessels. Some 4% of American coast-to-coast trade transits the canal, compared with 9% in 1964 and 50% in 1940. Few U.S. warships make the trip; the supercarriers are too big, and the nuclear submarines are vulnerable to detection and attack because they must be on the surface to make the crossing. Besides, the U.S. has maintained two virtually separate navies in the Atlantic and the Pacific...
...present anomaly remains: a small but proud nation cut in half by a huge waterway under the control of a foreign power. The arrangement may once have been economically justified, even a historical necessity, but it is a current indignity for Panamanians. As Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez Rodríguez told Carter: "The Panamanians feel exactly about the Canal Zone as North Americans would feel if the British owned the Mississippi River." In fact, Americans had much the same attitude as contemporary Panamanians when the Spanish and French (not the British) controlled the Mississippi...