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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   36571 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I sure hope we don't do anything stupid over the Panama Canal.

Carter already did something stupid over the panama canal - this would be just correcting his mistake.

Carter finds more success in the arena of foreign policy, where instead of dealing with mercurial politicians from his own country, he can deal with mercurial politicians from other countries. He starts by tackling the third rail of the Panama Canal. The United States built the Canal by essentially colonizing the part of Panama it runs through, and obviously, the Panamanians aren’t super cool with that. The U.S. government has been kicking the can down the road since the LBJ era by continually promising to return sovereignty over the canal to Panama eventually, and after over a decade of “eventually,” the Panamanians are getting impatient.

The politically easy move for Carter would be to drag out the negotiations until the canal becomes the next president’s problem, just as Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all did before him. But for better or for worse, Carter almost never does the politically easy thing. “It’s obvious we cheated the Panamanians out of their canal,” he says, and he negotiates a treaty in which ownership of the canal is turned over to Panama, in exchange for the U.S.’s right to militarily ensure its “neutral operation.” It’s a clever diplomatic solution—Panama gets nominal ownership while we retain all the benefits ownership provides—but the American public hates it. To the average voter, it feels like we’re just giving some random country “our” canal.

To get the treaty approved by the Senate, Carter plays the congressional negotiating game well for the first and maybe only time in his presidency. He lobbies heavily for his treaty with every senator, cutting individual deals with each of them as needed. One even goes so far as to say that in exchange for his vote, Carter has to… wait for it… read an entire semantics textbook the senator wrote back when he was a professor. Oh, and Carter also has to tell him what he thinks of it, in detail, to prove he actually read it. Carter is appalled, but he grits his teeth and reads the book. It’s a good thing he does, because the Senate ratifies the treaty by a single vote. Although it remains unpopular with the general public (five senators later lose their seats over their yes votes), those in the know understand that Carter cut a great deal for America. Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos knows it too. Ashamed of his poor negotiating skills, he gets visibly drunk at the signing ceremony and falls out of his chair. He also confesses that if the negotiations had broken down, he would have just had the military destroy the entire canal out of spite.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-outlier

(emphasis mine)

So he executed a stupidity brilliantly. US literally created Panama so they could build the canal.

Water under the bridge. By 1977, Panama was a country with her own history and a population with certain political inclinations. Reaching a compromise on the canal without violence was a good move.

Particularly since the Cold War and Cuban-sponsored regional insurgencies were still a thing.

As long as the Panama Canal was an American imperialist asset, it was a target of anti-American / pro-latin-american groups across the region. When it became a Panamanian sovereign asset, the later half of that interest-coalition disengaged, and became far more supportive, particularly in Panama where national self-interest aligned with keeping the canal running smoothly. Come the 1990 Just Cause invasion, a vast majority of the Panamanians supported the US intervention

Moreover, the turnover of the canal was a significant element on the United States transition from the early cold war period- where the conflicts were often remnants of imperial system breakdowns of managing post-imperial transitions amidst Soviet-backed peasant uprising- to the later cold war, where increasingly established / self-coherent governments gradually garnered more legitimacy. The Panama Canal turnover decreased perception of sovereignty-threat from the US, since if the US was willing to give up a strategic asset like the panama canal then there was almost certainly no asset / port / resource of your own that would be more appetizing to strategic greed.

Particularly since the Cold War and Cuban-sponsored regional insurgencies were still a thing.

And were, in fact, about to become a much bigger thing in Central America.

Thanks for the link, read the whole thing. Very entertaining.

What surprised me is that Carter was an outsider at the time. A lot of recent politics made me think Trump was one of the first true outsiders. Apparently not the case.

Carter was exactly the sort of politician normies say they want to see as a leader. It's rather sobering to observe how that all worked out for his legacy.

Between him and Reagan, the Democrats basically lost all access to a huge chunk of Boomers. They voted for him, he failed to deliver, and then Reagan promised something completely different.

I do think his legacy turned out okay. Even my grandfather, who is a pretty central example of one of those Boomers, doesn’t really seem to hold it against him personally.

I think he actually has a pretty solid legacy, no? I've never heard too many people complain that much about Carter. His main thing is his peanut farm.

The legacy of Carter the man is generally very positive. The legacy of Carter the President is generally quite negative - he's always considered the worst of any modern-day (ie post-1900) Democrat. He got demolished in his reelection bid, easily the worst performance by an incumbent in American history.

No? I can’t think of anyone I know who actually likes him except the most partisan democrats imaginable, who would vote for a Hitler/Satan ticket if it had a D afterwards.

Jimmy Carter's legacy as president is the Iranian hostage crisis, stagflation and malaise, and the energy crisis/rationing. Even nuking the snail darter and deregulating airlines can't make up for all that.

I guess not too many people complained about him in the sense that he was mostly seen as a sweet, thoughtful and caring old man. But I imagine he was scarcely seen as a successful and effective head of state, and more like somewhat of an idealistic, out-of-touch loser.

The actual policy legacy of the Carter administration (as opposed to Carter's personal reputation) held up pretty well given that we are now 45 years out.

The unambiguous successes include:

  • Volcker as Fed Chair, inflation tamed primarily through monetary policy
  • Deregulation of interstate trucking, airlines, etc.
  • The Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt
  • Transferring primary responsibility for defending South Korea from North Korea to South Korea, where it properly belongs
  • An unusually clean White House

Things Carter changed with impacts decades later even if conservatives don't like the result:

  • The Chrysler bailout
  • Setting up the Education Department
  • Government recognition for Asian-Americans as an identity group
  • Head Start
  • Modest tightening of environmental laws
  • A deal with Panama which allowed US shipping access to the Canal while avoiding the expense of maintaining a garrison in the Canal Zone.

Things which still looked like a success after 10+ years where we probably shouldn't blame Carter for his policy continued beyond the point of usefulness:

  • Supporting the muhajadeen to quagmire the Soviets in Afghanistan
  • Normalising relations with Red China (including the continued-to-this-day policy of informal recognition of Taiwan).
  • The Superfund law for dealing with the worst cases of land contaminated by industrial pollution.

Good ideas which Carter couldn't get past Congress, but is right with hindsight:

  • Spending discipline, and in particular the idea that the Executive should identify specific wasteful spending and ask Congress to cut it.
  • Natural gas deregulation (Congress took so long to pass the legislation that the benefits were felt after Carter left office, but with hindsight this is Carter's greatest achievement)

Deregulation of interstate trucking, airlines, etc.

Setting up the Education Department

Government recognition for Asian-Americans as an identity group

Can you explain why you see those as good decisions?

The last 2 are changes which have had long-lasting effects that Carter would presumably have wanted given that he was a Democrat. Whether they are good decisions is a fairly straightforwardly partisan issue, then and now. But from the point of view of Presidential legacy, successfully changing policy in your preferred direction in a way that sticks is an achievement.

The Carter transport deregulations are all good because they significantly reduced costs to individuals and businesses.

The US trucking industry has a serious problem of truckers ageing out of business and scarcely getting replaced, which is supposedly the long-term consequence of Carter's and Reagan's deregulations turning it into an unappealing career choice, as I've read on the interwebz.

If either your or @The_Nybbler’s interpretation is true, I’d expect it to feature prominently in other regulatory debates. Does trucking ever come up in fights over the EPA, or union law, or whatever?

Something is keeping employers from cranking up wages. It’s not a cartel, like the doctor supply, because trucking is unskilled and pretty darn distributed. It’s not a glut of cheap immigrant labor, not if we see a shortage across the board. Are truckers just literally not generating enough value to command higher wages? Is it getting eaten by tax and regulatory burdens?

I don’t understand economics.

The things that make trucking suck can’t be solved by regulation.

More comments

Seems more likely it's the tech and regulations changing it from a job you can do pretty much without supervision to having electronic leashes tracking every hour of every day and fining you if you do it wrong.

More comments

Yeah, was going to say the U.S. already fought a war in Panama in the modern era. It was over in a few weeks.

Obviously there are some other parties who might object to the U.S. controlling it this time. But I think there's probably a solution that falls far short of warfare here.

I think it bears mentioning that the reason that war was rather short was that it had no other goal than the capture of one rogue general usurping de facto rule over the state.

A few weeks is probably long enough for the Panamanian military(such as it is) to destroy the canal, or at least inflict enough damage to render it unusable for several years.

The US could almost certainly secure the canal faster than that. But it doesn't matter. The Panama Canal is Panama's raison d'etre. If they destroy it, the only thing they accomplish is to impoverish themselves if the US decides "LOL never mind". I don't believe they could repair or rebuild a substantially damaged canal themselves, and the US would certainly prevent any other power from doing so, so their only move at that point would be to allow the US to rebuild on its terms.

I suspect Trump is just bloviating and will eventually accept some token concession so he can say he got a "deal" -- the bit about "refusing to rule out military force" is meaningless of course the US will refuse to rule it out.

Probably?

From an engineering perspective, the Panama Canal is a system of 12 locks. If you want to destroy it, you need a handful of green recruits and a small amount of demolition charges. It's over before morning.

If you want the repairs to take years, you additionally need a few demolition crews experienced in concrete embankments. Drills, more charges, and every hour the marines don't take the locks adds a several months to the repair time.

The real question is ‘can panama repurpose construction workers before the marines land’. This is a very strong maybe.

Oh yeah, you've got to plan this, no way around it. But that's exactly what the military's there for, and they neither need a large chain of command to achieve that goal nor does it require a lot of resources. And totally surprising them will be very difficult, so first getting the charges and then the machines into position will be part of the posturing long before the marines even get into their helicopters.

But seriously, first blowing holes into the lock gates, then blowing the destroyed gates of their hinges and then blowing the drive units will be bad enough, especially if there's ships in or between the locks. There's a lot of force behind an 80' waterfall. And lead time on bespoke stuff like those huge gates is often measured in years...

Pretty much, and even this doesn't get into the issues of the cyber-vulnerabilities of someone who already controls the computer networks and what that can mean, or the ability to scuttle a ship already within the canal, or the fact that Panama is within drone attack range of various low-governance/hostile-to-the-US regional actors...

...and that none of those really go away if you capture the canal intact, since cyber-vulnerabilities are always there to be found, the whole point of the canal is to bring ships through, and, of course, regional reaction.

Anyone who thinks the Americans seizing the panama canal by force would be quick and easy and good is about as high on their own supply as the pro-Russians going into Ukraine.

My basic search is showing that panama lacks any Combat capable aircraft.

So IF it were actually going to be a fight, I dunno that they'd be able to pop their head out long enough to do much sabotage.

But more to the point, that's about the only piece of leverage they have to avoid a fight, so I suspect they might sign a deal rather than play that card.

The US could offer Panama statehood. We'd get the canal and a quarter of global shipping.

Wouldn't that make the problem of illegal immigration about 10 times worse?

How are they going to vote? Nothing is worth more D senators and electoral votes.

There'd need to be a 'Panama Compromise' that in addition to admitting Panama also allowed for Greater Idaho or Eastern Oregon and / or admitting the conservative areas of California to offset the adverse impact of Panama.

I imagine it’d be something like statehood for Puerto Rico and panama in exchange for the states of upstate New York and eastern Oregon. But if it goes sufficiently anti Republican Texas can split in two(or more, technically) without congressional approval- just sending the panhandle off on its own is two party-line Republican senators.

Just expel the locals and resettle Panama with Trump-voting loyalists. Maybe purge Puerto Rico and Connecticut at the same time.

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