Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States.

I'm Jim Lindsay, Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This week is the President's inbox year-end question and answer special.

We will be departing from the show's normal interview format to answer questions that

TPI listeners have submitted to us over the past few weeks.

With me to tackle your questions is Shannon O'Neill.

Shannon is the vice president, deputy director of studies,

and Nelson and David Rockefeller's senior fellow for Latin America studies here at the council.

She has written extensively on global trade, supply chains, Mexico, Latin America, and democracy.

Her most recent book, which I highly recommend buying and reading, is the

globalization myth, Why Regions Matter. Shannon, thank you for joining me.

Thanks for having me, Jim. It's a real pleasure. Now, I want to begin our conversation by

thanking everyone who submitted questions. Our audience has obviously been doing their homework.

We received a lot of great questions.

We're going to answer as many as we can in the time we have allotted. So my apologies,

that we don't get to the question that you asked. Shannon, we're going to begin with you,

and I have a question here from Ralph via email,

and Ralph asks, how serious is the Panama Canal transit problem? How will it affect trade and supply chains next year? Well, great. Thanks, Jim. And thanks, Ralph. That's a great question.

So for those who aren't following it, the Panama Canal is one of the most important

waterways that connects the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean.

But 5% of global trade goes through there, and they are having problems because of drought.

So the water levels have fallen, which means fewer boats and fewer of the bigger boats and container ships can get through that passageway. That wouldn't seem

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