Ships waiting to pass through the Panama Canal

dpa | By Andrea Sosa Cabrios

Published

WASHINGTON — U.S. government ships will no longer pay to transit through the Panama Canal, the US Department of State said on Wednesday, following fierce criticism from Washington over the administration of the waterway.

"The government of Panama has agreed to no longer charge fees for U.S. government vessels to transit the Panama Canal," the Department of State said in a post on social media platform X. "This saves the U.S. government millions of dollars a year."

There was initially no comment from the Panamanian side.

In his inauguration speech on January 20, US President Donald Trump laid claim to the Panama Canal. He has since bluntly stated on several occasions that the United States should have checks on the important waterway, claims that his Panamanian counterpart, José Raúl Mulino, has firmly rejected.

Trump also claims that China is operating the important waterway in Central America. Both Panama and China have rejected the allegations.

However, Panama has been under considerable pressure to make concessions. Trump did not rule out military action.

The 82-kilometre canal connects the Atlantic with the Pacific in Central America. It was built at the beginning of the 20th century by the engineering corps of the US Army.

On December 31, 1999, the U.S. handed over the canal administration to Panama. The transaction was negotiated by the recently deceased Democratic US president Jimmy Carter.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also criticized China's influence on the waterway as he travelled to Panama over the weekend to underscore Trump's call for checks.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) on Wednesday said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Panama's Minister of Public Security, Frank Alexis Ábrego, over the phone "that his top priority is to safeguard U.S. national security interests ... to include ensuring unfettered access to the Panama Canal and keeping it free from foreign interference."

Ábrego wrote on X that in the Tuesday call it was agreed that Hegseth would visit Panama in April. He only said of the call that the two "expressed mutual interest in technical cooperation to guarantee security and counter hemispheric, narco-terrorist and irregular migration threats."

The Hong Kong company Hutchison Ports PPC has been operating large container terminals on both sides of the canal for decades. The company is owned not by the Chinese state, but by a wealthy Hong Kong family.

However, there are concerns that the government in Beijing could also use private Chinese companies to expand its influence over ports and shipping routes.

©2025 dpa GmbH. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.[1]

Military Headlines[2] US Navy Topics[3] Global Hot Spots[4] Department of Defense - DoD[5] Pentagon[6]

© Copyright 2025 dpa. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read more

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth

WASHINGTON — Leading Republican senators are expressing serious concerns about what they consider the isolationist bent of President Donald Trump’s emerging Pentagon team.

Elbridge Colby, whom Trump has tapped to be the Pentagon’s policy chief, believes the U.S. military needs to focus on China and substantially reduce its forces in Europe and the Middle East.

Several others in Trump’s orbit, some of whom are already working as deputy assistant secretaries of Defense, largely think the same. And Trump himself has articulated at least some of these same views.

One top Defense Department official has argued the Army should sacrifice nearly $14 billion from its annual budget to bankroll the Air Force and Navy.

More traditional GOP senators who oversee the Pentagon, and a large portion of Democrats, support deterring China but are wary of wholesale withdrawals of U.S. forces from areas of the world where tensions are rife or active wars continue to rage.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R- Ky., who chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, has been openly and fiercely critical in the last several weeks of the views of some of the new Pentagon officials, just as he has publicly rebutted in the last two years those in his party who are unwilling to support Ukraine.

Now Sen. Roger Wicker, R- Miss., the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the committee’s top Democrat, said in brief interviews this week that the views of Colby and his aides are concerning to a number of senators and will be a focus of both Colby’s as-yet-unscheduled confirmation hearing and the broader defense debate ahead.

Wicker said he has met with Colby and that senators will be asking the nominee about these issues when he appears before the panel soon.

“It is a concern to a number of senators,” Wicker said on Tuesday.

Reed, for his part, agreed that the questions about the new slate of Pentagon officials will be a focus in Colby’s hearing and beyond.

“We’re going to take a look at that in the context of the hearing,” Reed said Wednesday. “Those are very fair questions about policy direction.”

Intraparty conflict

This tension in GOP ranks between self-styled “restrainers,” on the one hand, and what some might call “neoconservatives,” on the other, has been simmering in the wake of America’s mixed results in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But now, with Republicans in control of Washington, their party’s leaders say their internal rift will play out more saliently and with higher stakes in the form of policies, budgets and troop movements.

The president and his national security advisers, along with the secretary of State, more than any Defense Department officials, will set U.S. national security policies.

It remains unclear how some of these decisions will go — or, in some cases, whether today’s decisions will survive into tomorrow or will be contradicted by other moves.

Trump and Vice President JD Vance have argued for making Europeans pay more and do more to defend themselves. And they have questioned the wisdom of America providing security assistance to Ukraine. They support U.S. economic and military aid for its wealthy Mideast ally, Israel, but they have suggested U.S. troops should play a smaller role in the region.

But Trump is unpredictable and inconsistent, traits that were on full display Tuesday evening, when the president announced that America should “own” Gaza after first clearing it of ordnance — and its 2 million or so residents — and then building something “magnificent.”

Trump, usually a critic of so-called nation-building led by Americans overseas and of “forever wars,” did not rule out sending in U.S. troops to perform the job in Gaza.

Reed said Trump’s unexpected announcement will add a new wrinkle to the Colby hearing and the debate over America’s global posture.

“Given the president’s discussions about Gaza, that probably puts in an element that didn’t exist before,” Reed said.

Hard on the heels of Tuesday’s Gaza news, with its unclear implications for U.S. troops, it emerged that Trump is pushing to bring American forces home from another Mideast country.

The Pentagon, at Trump’s behest, is drawing up plans to bring home some 2,000 U.S. troops deployed in Syria, NBC News reported.

The ‘restrainers’

Colby served for part of Trump’s first term as deputy assistant secretary for strategy and force development at the Pentagon, where he was a lead author of the 2018 national defense strategy.

That document put a greater Defense Department focus than before on the threat from China, a position with bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. To move the military in that direction, though, Colby has called for retrenchment of the U.S. troop presence in Europe and the Middle East — and that is where differences have arisen.

As Colby has made the rounds in Senate offices in the last week to garner support for his nomination, several deputy assistant secretaries of Defense with views that largely mirror Colby’s have already been installed — and in some cases go further toward what might be called isolationism.

As multiple news organizations have reported in recent weeks, several of the appointees have ties to libertarian think tanks, such as Defense Priorities, that want to reduce U.S. troop presence abroad.

Michael DiMino, who will be in charge of Mideast policy, said in a webcast last year that U.S. interests in the Middle East are “minimal to nonexistent.”

Austin Dahmer, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for strategy, has said that, to ensure America’s military can redeploy forces to deter China, the U.S. Army’s annual budget should be cut by more than $68 billion over five years to fund the lion’s share of an $83 billion-plus boost over that time frame to the combined budgets of the Air Force and Navy.

The Army, he has argued, should lose four Stryker brigades, six infantry brigades and two aviation brigades, plus other vehicles and aircraft, and he has called for a 5 percent cut to “civilian/contractor personnel” — unless the Pentagon gets a 10 percent budget increase.

Ukraine plan due soon

Another serving Defense official whose views put them in this camp is Alexander Velez-Green, an adviser to the undersecretary for policy, which is the position for which Colby has been nominated. Velez-Green is currently performing the undersecretary’s duties.

Also in the “restrainer” group is Dan Caldwell, who led the Trump transition team for Pentagon staffing. Caldwell is reportedly under consideration to become deputy to Keith Kellogg, the retired general who is Trump’s envoy for Ukraine and Russia.

Kellogg is scheduled to speak at the Munich Security Conference later this month, and press reports indicate he may unveil at the event Trump’s plan for ending the war in Ukraine.

Newly installed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, an Army veteran and former Fox News host who has no experience in defense strategy, may come to rely on the views of his undersecretaries and their top aides. His own positions on U.S. support for Ukraine or American troop deployments in the Middle East have not always been clear or consistent.

Regardless, Trump’s Pentagon leadership will not set U.S. strategy by themselves.

The president will lead the way. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and national security adviser Michael Waltz are widely known as China hawks, but neither has issued the kind of robust calls for military withdrawal from other theaters that have come from the Colby camp.

‘Alarming’ positions

Regardless, traditionalists on Capitol Hill are worried.

“President Trump has committed to restoring peace through strength and standing with Israel, but the folks staffing up his Pentagon operation don’t appear to have read the memo,” McConnell told Jewish Insider on Jan. 23. “It’s alarming that people can clear vetting after claiming U.S. interests in the Middle East are ‘minimal to nonexistent,’ suggesting that America should ‘militarily retrench’ from the region, or claiming that providing Israel even defensive assistance against Iran-backed terrorists is escalatory.”

Leaders of the Republican Jewish Coalition wrote Wicker on Jan. 30 to urge him to swiftly confirm Colby, who they said would be “an asset to President Trump’s solidly pro- Israel national security team.”

The fact that the group felt the need to send the letter at all suggests the extent of Senate Republicans’ heartburn over the pattern of Trump’s Pentagon nominees.

___

©2025 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com.[1] Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

© Copyright 2025 CQ-Roll Call. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Read more

A young Palestinian kid carries jerricans

After President Donald Trump's announcement Tuesday that he was prepared to use U.S. military forces in Gaza, the Pentagon appeared to once again be caught off guard by the change in policy, and officials were unable to offer any details or confirm any planning.

"The U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip, and we will do a job with it, too," Trump told reporters at a news conference Tuesday evening alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He vowed to turn the territory that two million Palestinians call home into "the Riviera of the Middle East."

Trump didn't rule out using U.S. troops to accomplish that goal when asked by reporters, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters Wednesday[1] that he was "prepared to look at all options."

Read Next: Elon Musk Aide Is Now Working at VA and Accessing Its Computer Systems[2]

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday also called Trump's plan historic, "outside-of-the-box" thinking while also not ruling out the use of U.S. troops. She said Trump had not committed to putting "boots on the ground."

Meanwhile, when several military officials within the Pentagon were asked by Military.com about any plans, they were not prepared to offer any details.

One official said they were unaware of any plans being drawn up, before adding a phrase that is so often repeated that it has become cliche within the walls of the Pentagon: "We are a planning organization, though."

Hegseth commented to reporters on Wednesday but provided no new details on any military planning for Gaza.

"The president is involved in very complex and high-level negotiations of great consequence to both the United States and the state of Israel, and we look forward to working with our allies, our counterparts, both diplomatically and militarily, to look at all options," Hegseth said.

"We certainly would not get ahead of the president or provide details about what we may or may not do," he said.

In fact, Pentagon officials have spent most of the early days of Trump's second term reacting to executive orders or policy announcements that they would learn about at the same time as the public.

The military had to scramble to push troops to the southern border[3] after Trump ordered their involvement, and officials then had no details to offer when Trump and Hegseth said military strikes inside Mexico were on the table[4].

Officials weren't ready to say how they would detain nearly 30,000 migrants in Guantanamo Bay[5] in the days after Trump said he wanted to use the remote base in Cuba for his deportation efforts. The Pentagon also had no ready plan to allow troops who were booted for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine to return to service with back pay when that order was signed.

Experts have already[6] chimed in and noted[7] that Trump's plan to forcibly remove the Palestinians in Gaza, seize control of the land and redevelop it would be a colossal logistical and financial challenge that could easily trigger a new wave of violence and conflict.

Plus, there doesn't appear to be any legal authority that would allow the U.S. to seize control of Gaza, and removing its entire population would violate international law.

Saudi Arabia[8], as well as Turkey and Egypt[9], also issued statements overnight condemning the plan.

Trump's bombshell announcement that he intends the U.S. to take control of one of the most volatile areas in the world comes after him campaigning on keeping the U.S. out of foreign wars.

The U.S. military was involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for two decades, efforts that included holding territory and building up local areas, similar to what the president proposed on Tuesday.

The eagerness to involve the U.S. military in Gaza is also a sharp departure from the position that many Republicans took less than a year ago when they criticized President Joe Biden's plan to use an Army[10] mobile pier system to deliver aid to the war-stricken region.

In April, as the pier was being set up, a mortar attack on the area[11] led Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, to release a statement saying that[12], "Biden should never have put our men and women in this position, and he should abandon this project immediately before any U.S. troops are injured" and that "the risk to Americans will only intensify."

No troops were injured.

Then, after a few disappointing months of operation[13], Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the Republican lawmaker who leads the House Armed Services Committee, wrote to the Biden administration and called for an end to the mission[14], citing among other reasons the fact that three service members were injured in the effort.

The injuries occurred at sea, because the Biden administration was firm on the fact that no U.S. troops would set foot in Gaza.

Related: First 10 Migrants Arrive at Guantanamo Bay and Will Be Held in Terrorist Prison[15]

© Copyright 2025 Military.com. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Military.com, please submit your request here[16].

Read more

A painting of Civil War-era soldiers.When America's favorite groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, emerged from his cozy burrow at Gobbler's Knob, Feb. 2, 2025, he saw his shadow, and according to legend, that means we're in for six more weeks of winter. 

Many Americans associate Groundhog Day with

Read more

More Articles …