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US Marines Panama 1989: US invasion of Panama was first step toward the 'forever wars'
[Responsible Statecraft] When the red tracers of an AC130 gunship’s minigun slashed through the warm, dry night skies above Panama City at 12:41 AM on December 20, 1989, few guessed that it would mark an opening stanza in America’s expansive unipolar moment.In the hours that followed, more than 20,000 U.S. troops conducted a swift and violent invasion of a sovereign state to remove the inconvenient and venal regime of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, who had embarrassed and bedeviled U.S. policymakers for years. Now nearly forgotten, this invasion — bequeathed with the trite and even cynical name of "Operation JUST CAUSE" — marked a tentative but crucial first step toward the "forever wars" of today. Freed from the frightening, but disciplining, constraints of the Cold War, American leaders were now unchecked by rival powers, and the very perception of success for Operation JUST CAUSE would help shape their decisions going forward. Conceived as the illegitimate child of America’s late 19th and early 20th century flirtation with regional imperialism and the naval theories of U.S. Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, Panama and its canal have long exerted significant pull over U.S. strategy and domestic politics. A more fulsome account of the U.S.-Panamanian relationship is beyond the scope of this essay, but the hypocrisy and bad faith on both sides in this tragicomic saga has few equals, even in the annals of U.S. hemispheric policy. The 1977 Panama Canal Treaty was ratified against fierce Republican opposition, and it provided for a 22-year turnover transition during which time there would be a hybrid administration of the Canal Zone. By 1989, this resulted in a dizzying checkerboard of U.S. and Panama Defense Force (PDF) military installations interspersed next to and co-located with each other across the isthmus. The U.S. reserved the treaty right to intervene militarily to protect the canal. The agreement, however, was predicated upon the assumption of good relations between the signatories, a dubious proposition even under the nationalist but pragmatic Panamanian regime of Omar Torrijos. When the cartoonishly duplicitous Manuel Noriega assumed de facto power in Panama after Torrijos’ death in 1981, he initially leveraged support for Reagan’s policies in Central America to mask his growing ties with drug cartels and other adversaries. This awkward fling ended, when Noriega’s 1987 indictment on federal drug charges ushered in a hostile turn in relations. Posted by: Besoeker 2025-05-11 |
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