The Panama Canal at 100: What's Next for Hemispheric Trade?

With the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I attracting significant attention, today’s centennial of the opening of the Panama Canal — an engineering achievement of its time — is passing relatively unremarked. That’s too bad, because completion of the canal was also a seminal historic event that dramatically cut the time and cost of shipping between coasts, and opened up entire new geographic areas for commercial development, including Panama itself. For a century, the waterway has been a main artery of hemispheric and global trade. It would not have been built, however, without active support from Washington and a vision for regional development that was required to face down critics, competitors and crippling diseases such as yellow fever. Then, as now, leadership and hard work were required to get the job done.

As trade expansion efforts often do, construction of the canal led to the establishment of a special relationship between the United States and Panama that arguably lasted from the founding of Panama as a nation in 1903 until the turnover of the canal by treaty in 1999...

Read the full article in U.S. News & World Report's online opinion section.