After four years of the Biden administration, suffering one humiliating defeat on the international stage after another, you might think it's going to take some time to get used to winning again. It turns out, it's been rather easy to adapt to success, and each victory leaves you with an appetite wanting more. 

A week and a half ago, President Donald Trump sent a couple of military cargo planes full of Colombian nationals here illegally to repatriate them in the South American country. Colombian President Gustavo Petro refused to allow the planes to land. Trump immediately dropped the hammer - 25% tariffs on all goods coming from Colombia into the United States. 'Oh, what'll that do to coffee prices?', lefties and Trump haters united in chorus...for 37 minutes. Petro caved, fully and completely. Offered to let our planes land, volunteered to send his plane to come get the rest and fly them home...on his gas. Trump haters called that bullying. Looks like a big W to me. 

This past weekend was Latin American Groundhog Day for American foreign policy. What began as an ominous confrontation building between the U.S. and Panama turned into another win for Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump foreign policy agenda. 

After a tour of the Panama Canal, Secretary Rubio held one-on-one talks with Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino. If you follow the reporting from resistance media, you would have no idea that any progress at all was made. Headlines Sunday night ranged from "Rubio Says Panama Must Reduce Chinese Influence Around the Canal Or Face Possible U.S. Action" in the Associated Press, to "US Ratchets Up Panama Canal Rhetoric During Rubio Visit" in Politico. Again, only the ominous stuff, tensions increasing, Trump picking a fight-themed stories. Not one, save Matthew Foldi in the Washington Reporter, and then actually picked up on the actual news from the weekend. Panama caved.      
No sooner had Rubio left Panama and headed to his next stop, El Salvador, than President Mulino held a press conference to make a statement. He was immediately informing China that Panama will not renew its Belt and Road deal with the CCP, and will actively take steps to pull out of the existing deal before its expiration date in two years. What does that mean? China will very soon no longer control both ends of the Canal. That's exactly what Trump wanted. 

“The 2017 memorandum of understanding on the Silk Road, part of the Belt and Road initiative, will not be renewed by my government,” Mulino said. “That is a fact. We are going to study the possibility of whether it can be ended earlier or not. I think it is up for renewal in one or two years, because it’s every three. So that initiative which was signed will not be renewed by my government.”

The Belt and Road Initiative was the CCP's 2013 project to fund and provide manpower to infrastructure projects all over the world - with a major catch. If the poor countries China fronts money and manpower to cannot pay for it, the CCP stays put and uses the new infrastructure for their interests. It should have been called Belt, Road, and Strings, because there are more of them attached than in the last Spiderman movie. 

Panama's deal with China in 2017, signing the Belt and Road Initiative, was the CCP's first beachhead into the Latin American part of the world. In order for Panama to get the money and resources offered by the ChiComs, they had to renounce recognition of Taiwan, which they did very shortly before the deal was inked. That was then. After literally two weeks of pressure from a new administration in Washington, and a personal visit from the new Secretary of State, here is the Panamanian President shifting course, effectively immediately.

NEW @DC_Reporter:

WATCH Panama's president confirm, following his meeting with @SecRubio, that his country will NOT be renewing its partnership with China on the Belt and Road Initiative

ft. @MikeWaltz47, @RepHuizenga, @Bonnie_Glick, @michaelsobolik https://t.co/u9aePTS9Ki pic.twitter.com/9VpbCt4Ltx

— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) February 2, 2025

What does Panama get? They get to keep the canal. That's fine. It was theirs anyway after Jimmy Carter returned it to them. They're honestly getting nothing from us. And what did we get? Panama gets out from under the influence of the CCP post haste, and agrees to work on the Darien Gap with us to more effectively prevent the flow of illegal migration northward into the United States. There's really no downside from the perspective of the U.S. From Foldi's story, he quotes Michael Sobolik of the Hudson Institute. 

The Hudson Institute’s Michael Sobolik agreed: “This is a huge win for America,” he said. “Panama was the First Nation in Latin America to join the Belt and Road Initiative in 2017. It did so mere months after switching diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing. Secretary Rubio is already off to a strong start.”

Now to be fair, this is just the beginning of extracting the CCP weeds out of Columbian soil, root and branch. There still must be persistent effort by the Colombians, and pressure maintained by the Americans, to continue what was started this weekend, but one cannot conclude anything other than this is an extraordinary first step. 

Just as a kicker to remind you of how badly broken media is, let's return to the Associated Press story for a minute. Here's the first three graphs.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio brought a warning to Panamanian leader José Raúl Mulino on Sunday: Immediately reduce what President Donald Trump says is Chinese influence over the Panama Canal area or face potential retaliation from the United States. 

Rubio, traveling to the Central American country and touring the Panama Canal on his first foreign trip as top U.S. diplomat, held face-to-face talks with Mulino, who has resisted pressure from the new U.S. government over management of a waterway that is vital to global trade. 

Mulino told reporters after the meeting that Rubio made “no real threat of retaking the canal or the use of force.”

The headline, followed by the first three paragraphs, gives you a sense that no real progress was made, and that a confrontation is shaping up after Trump's bluster that he wanted to take the Canal back, by force if necessary. AP literally buried the lede of the story 8 graphs in. 

The president did say Panama would not be renewing its agreement with China’s Belt and Road Initiative when it expires. Panama joined the initiative, which promotes and funds infrastructure and development projects that critics say leave poor member countries heavily indebted to China, after dropping diplomatic recognition of Taiwan and recognizing Beijing.

Oh. Well, that certainly is a concession, isn't it? Don't you think that might be the focal point of the piece in a normal world? And this article is co-written by Matt Lee, whom I adore as a reporter. Every time there's a State Department briefing with a Democrat in the White House and Matt Lee in the press room, it's popcorn time. He's a terrific journalist. I have no clue why AP missed the news here. 

If you've ever been to Mexico, or any other Latin American country, you haggle over price. Nothing is ever sold for what is listed. You see a pretty bracelet. The street vendor wants $100 for it. You offer a buck. He comes back at $50. You haggle until settling on $10. You think you got a deal. It probably cost him $2. He's thrilled. It's an insult to Latin American culture if you don't push back a bit on price. 

Trump says we're taking the Canal back. Mulino said not a chance in hell. It's ours, we're keeping it. Rubio shows up, and within a day, gets what we wanted in the end - China getting their grubby hands off of it, easing the way for American commerce to travel through the Canal at a much more reasonable price for us. Again, just objectively looking at it, no other way to describe it than another W. But to media, who hate Donald Trump with the heat of a thousand suns, they get hung up on the asking price, seizing control of the Canal by force, instead of Donald Trump's foreign policy team chalking up another advantage to the United States that Joe Biden and his team couldn't have imagined possible during their four miserable years in office. 

I saw one person online acknowledge Mulino's address that they were exiting out of the deal as soon as possible, and replied, "So what. Leaving a year early. Meaningless." Without Trump's influence, Panama would have renewed the deal next year without a second thought had Kamala Harris been president. Forget about Panama for a moment. China has just suffered a pretty significant setback, which also now gives Trump a little more leverage when the time comes to deal with China's Xi Jinping directly. 

China is now under a 10% tariff, effectively Saturday. Mexico and Canada are under 25% tariffs. Will Canada and Mexico cave as quickly, or at all? No clue. I'm still an agnostic on the long-term effectiveness of tariffs once implemented. Will we get what Trump wants in the end, which is more cooperation on the Canadian and Mexican side of the border when it comes to interdicting drug and human trafficking? I sure hope so. Seems like a small price for Canada and Mexico to pay in order to have their products be allowed to compete for U.S. consumer dollars again. We'll see what the results are soon enough. But thus far, the threat of tariffs alone has been more than enough to reshape parts of the world to comport with what's in our national interests. And that's a very, very good thing.