ILLEGAL INVASION OF PANAMA
Apr 13, 2015
Eytan Gilboa, "The Panama Invasion Revisited: Lessons for the Use of Force in the Post Cold War Era," Political Science Quarterly, (v110 n4), p539The 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama was the first American use of force since 1945 thatwas unrelated to the cold war. It was also the first large-scale use of American troops abroad since Vietnam and the most violent event in Panamanian history. It ended withthe unusual capture of Manuel Antonio Noriega, Panama's head of state, who was then brought to the United States and tried for criminal drug operations. Despite the end of the cold war, dictators such as Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Serbian leaders Slobodan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic will continue to exist and to challenge the international order. How should the United States, the only remaining superpower, deal with these kinds of authoritarian leaders? What lessons can we learn from the Noriega challenge and the means employed by the United States to handle him?
Noriega was a corrupt dictator heading an efficient narcomilitaristic regime in Panama. He was involved in drug trafficking, arms smuggling, money laundering, andthe ruthless oppression of his people. He also systematically violated the American-Panamanian Canal treaties and harassed U.S. forces and institutions in Panama. But were all these violations sufficient to justify a massive military intervention to removeNoriega from power? In the last forty years, the United States intervened in Latin American countries but always in connection with perceived communist threats and the cold war. Noriega was not a communist and did not plan to move Panama into the Soviet sphere of influence. On the contrary, he played a key role in American efforts to contain the spread of communism in Central America. Historically, Panama was strategically important to the United States because of the Panama Canal. By the mid-1980s, however, the canal had lost much of its strategic value.(1) In 1978 President Jimmy Carter recognized this change and negotiated an agreement to transfer control of the canal to Panama by the end of the century.(2)
Why then, in the absence of cold war considerations, did the United States consider a relatively insignificant dictator a major challenge whose removal from power requiredfull-scale military intervention? To answer this question, one must examine a combination of factors: escalation in the conflict, domestic priorities including the waron drugs, George Bush's leadership difficulties, and America's new global responsibilities as the sole remaining superpower.
The Noriega problem began in 1985 as an internal Panamanian affair. Between 1985 and the 1989 U.S. invasion, it went through a series of five minicrises. A turning point occurred in February 1988, when the United States declared drugs to be the major threat to American society at the same time that Noriega was indicted in Florida for drug trafficking and money laundering. Following the indictments, the United States sought to remove Noriega from power. The Reagan and Bush administrations hoped for and preferred a Panamanian solution, like a coup d'etat, an election that would end Noriega's rule, or a popular uprising of the kind that removed from power dictators such as Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines.
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