S8 Ep421: Mary Anastasia O'Grady of the Wall Street Journal discusses the Panama Supreme Court's ruling removing Chinese port contracts, correcting misconceptions about Chinese military control or ownership of the canal.
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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1866 PANAMA
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchel. I welcome my good colleague, Mary Anastasio Grady. |
| 0:20.2 | She is the America's columnist and |
| 0:22.4 | editor for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, and we have good news in Mary's column. |
| 0:28.1 | It's almost hard to believe, given all the turmoil in Latin America these days. The good news is |
| 0:33.8 | the good guys win. Mary, a very good evening to you. The Panama Canal, the romance, the risk, |
| 0:41.2 | the dare, the invention, all of that in the early 20th century. And here we are in the early |
| 0:46.6 | 21st century. And we were told there was great risk that the People's Republic of China were |
| 0:52.2 | taking over both end of the canal and the American |
| 0:55.6 | people were about to lose their access to either ocean, which is a major part of the traffic |
| 1:01.6 | through the canal, there's American traffic. But I learned that the court in Panama has made a |
| 1:09.1 | decision that asks China to leave as soon as possible. What's happened, |
| 1:13.2 | Mary? Good evening to you. Well, good evening, John. I think I should start by saying the whole |
| 1:17.6 | idea that China was taking over the canal was a completely distorted picture of what goes on |
| 1:22.9 | at the Panama Canal. That was brought to you by Donald Trump in December of 2024 when he was still |
| 1:28.3 | president-elect. He started shouting that China was controlling the canal, that Chinese soldiers |
| 1:34.1 | were guarding the canal, that the canal really belonged to the U.S., that we should never have |
| 1:39.0 | given it back to the Panamanians, and on and on and on. And he said that he was going to take action to take the canal back. |
| 1:48.0 | Now, since then, you know, I've tried to write a number of different columns explaining why the canal, A, does not belong to the U.S., and B, is not under the control of China. |
| 2:01.5 | There's the Panama Canal Authority, which constitutionally is an independent or an autonomous region in the country. |
| 2:11.9 | It does not answer to the government. |
| 2:14.1 | It has its own board of governors. |
| 2:16.6 | Think about the Federal Reserve or something like that, you know, an independent government. It has its own board of governors. Think about the Federal Reserve or something |
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