Panama Braces for Possible War

“Marco Rubio’s weekend visit to Panama is set to offer clues to a pressing question: whether the next four years of American policy will more closely resemble an imperial conquest or a hardball real estate negotiation,” Politico reports.

“On the ground here, members of the country’s small political elite have been bracing for either: As tensions over the Panama Canal ratcheted up last month, Panama’s former president, Ernesto Pérez Balladares, sat in his office on the 10th floor of a bank building and contemplated the worst-case scenario: an American invasion.”