WASHINGTON -- The spate of stories contending that China is "taking over" the Panama Canal as the United States exits under the terms of the canal treaty has reached a disturbing level.
At a recent Senate hearing Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., raised ominous alarms about Chinese missiles in Panama pointed at the United States.At the same hearing, the commanding officer of SouthCom, Marine Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, and other U.S. officials condemned these warnings as completely without basis.
U.S. specialists on both China and Panama agree that the so-called strategic value of warehouse complexes operated by a Chinese company at the Balboa end of the canal is very doubtful. These "go-down" facilities exercise no control over passage through the canal.
The United States can and will know anything the Chinese might in future years attempt to do with the warehouse facilities -- and, in extremis, could easily "neutralize" anything we might feel constituted a threat.
In fact, the principal threat would be to Japanese and Korean shippers who might find the cost of their cars going up as they transit the canal to the U.S. market.
U.S. officials point out that there are no Chinese nationals working on the Hutchison-Whampoa warehouses in question. While it may be subject to Beijing's influence, the company itself is headquartered
in England, not China: Hutchison is a long-established international company with resources around the world, including in Taiwan.
The historic two-ocean threat is irrelevant in today's strategic world. We have separate naval forces in each ocean, and no one contends that we would need urgently to move a task force through the canal -- in the first place, task forces center around a carrier, and today's carriers and other major vessels cannot fit through the canal.
The canal was and will be vulnerable to any disaffected Panamanian working on the canal. For instance, a hand grenade in a lunch bucket can disable a lock.
Recall that U.S. employees never did the "donkey work" on the canal -- they supervised a Panamanian work force. Thus the potential threat to the canal has been and will continue to be found in its work force, not the warehouse complexes. One could more readily imagine a threat of Cuban subversion directed at this work force.
The canal was useful in World War II and the Korean War, and relatively secure because our enemies had no apparent influence with Panamanian workers.
Since then, its value has dropped sharply in strategic terms and in economic terms has been an expense for U.S. taxpayers who in practice have been underwriting Japanese and other Asian exporters to the United States.
Gen. Wilhelm and other dispassionate, knowledgeable officials agree that it would be valuable to retain a military relationship with Panama as an instrument in the war on drugs. The newly elected Panamanian government is apparently interested in seeking such an agreement.
Let's pursue negotiations with the new Panamanian government on mutual interests, including strategic cooperation in the war on drugs and potential Cuban subversion and end this infatuation with an imaginary Chinese threat in Panama.
Kempton Jenkins is a retired career diplomat who is a senior counselor at APCO Associates, a global strategic communications based in Washington.
Knight-Ridder/Tribune Information Services