Mr Carney has previously ruled out weaponising Canada’s energy exports, perhaps in part because doing so might irritate Ms Smith’s constituents. He is now being urged, at a minimum, to consider the possibility of applying an export duty on Canadian energy bound for the United States if Mr Trump follows through on his fresh threat to double tariffs on Canadian-built automobiles to 50%. “I don’t think they want us to stop sending any of that energy,” Mr Carney said on August 22nd. Any levy on Canadian energy is fraught with peril. Large eastern cities such as Toronto and Montreal get much of their fuel via pipelines that run through the United States, carrying hydrocarbons both from Alberta and American sources. On August 24th Mr Trump made a veiled threat to turn off the tap. The more existential danger would be to Canada’s national unity. In October Albertans will vote in a referendum (triggered by a petition) which asks whether they are happy to remain in Canada or would prefer to hold a second and binding referendum on secession. Even if Mr Ford is right that energy exports give Canada leverage over the United States, it is not a weapon that can be used without risking great self-harm. The effect of Canada’s federal government cutting off rich Albertans from their biggest customer is hard to predict, but it is unlikely to help the argument for the province to remain Canadian. Provincial politics also explain part of Mr Carney’s motivation for declining Mr Trump’s deal. Quebecers will vote in October for a new provincial government. Public-opinion surveys suggest the separatist Parti Québécois holds a slim lead. Mr Carney says the United States wanted to water down measures protecting Canada’s French-language and culture, a demand that, if acquiesced to, might have empowered separatism in Quebec, too. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs target states such as Michigan and Maine where Republican senators are struggling in tight midterm races. Mr Carney must hope that America’s cost-of-living issues, inflamed by higher prices on Canadian imports, push Mr Trump to reopen talks and thereby, at last, give Canada some stability. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/08/23/the-costs-of-defying-donald- trump-are-mounting-for-canada
Donald Trump’s military expansion in Panama makes little sense It is warping the neutrality which protects the country’s canal Aug 27th 2026 SPEEDBOATS INTERCEPT a suspicious ship near the entrance to the Panama Canal. Troops board it and bundle the bad guys off. On the Caribbean coast, special forces launch an assault on a rebel base. On the outskirts of Panama city, the capital, Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters buzz overhead. From August 3rd to 13th, Panamanians witnessed a display of military prowess not seen in the country for almost two decades. This was Panamax, a multinational military exercise led by the United States to practise fending off possible threats to the Panama Canal. Held roughly every two years since 2003, for the past 13 its simulation has been run from bases in Texas and Florida. This year it was done in Panama proper. Over
1,700 troops, mostly American but including soldiers from 17 (mostly Latin American) countries, engaged in “kinetic operations” across the country. “I’ve no issue with tabletop exercises but you can’t replicate this,” said Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, dressed in a sweat-soaked olive-green t-shirt. The canal is “a key piece of terrain. We’ve got more troops here in partnership with Panama than we’ve had in a very long time.” The United States has renewed its interest in the western hemisphere since Donald Trump regained office. It has intervened militarily in Venezuela, ramped up economic pressure on Cuba, bullied Canada and menaced Greenland. And Mr Trump has repeatedly threatened to take control of the Panama Canal. For Southcom, the US Joint Command focused on Latin America, “ensuring unfettered US access to the Panama Canal is a top priority.” But this military expansionism does not sit comfortably with the treaties that govern the canal. And how effective will it be? Mr Hegseth was speaking at Fort Sherman, one of three American- Panamanian training schools he announced on his previous trip, in April 2025. In the second half of the 20th century hundreds of thousands of troops undertook gruelling jungle-warfare training at Fort Sherman, many of them before being sent to Vietnam. “Green Hell” was closed in 1999, along with
13 other American military installations, as a condition of the 1977 Canal Neutrality Treaty, which banned foreign military installations. Panama’s government says the revived “Jungle School” is not a new foreign military base. But opposition politicians call it a “camouflaged invasion”. Panama’s constitution bars the country from having an army, but since becoming president in 2024 José Raúl Mulino has beefed up Senafront, the border-control force, and Senan, the naval and air service. Last year Panama agreed to buy four Brazilian fighter planes. In April it received the first of an order of surveillance drones and interceptor boats from the United States. Together with port-scanning and cyber-security equipment, the United States has given technology worth more than $174m to the security forces, says Mr Mulino. In August his government launched a new joint command of Panamanian security forces, funded by canal revenue and dedicated to defending the waterway and its hydrographic basin. Panamax was also a chance for Latin American members of the Americas Counter-Cartel Coalition, formerly known as the Shield of the Americas, to meet. Mr Hegseth said Colombia, along with Honduras and Guatemala, had agreed to allow joint American military operations in their territory “to bring the fight to the [designated terrorist organisations] on land”. (Guatemala denies it has agreed.) With Colombia’s new president, Abelardo de la Espriella, promising an aggressive campaign against criminal groups, Panama is preparing to deal with the spillover. On August 15th Senafront sent more than 700 special forces to Panama’s southern border to try to stop gangsters entering through the heavily forested Darién Gap that separates the two countries. “The canal’s enemy is narco-trafficking, and no one else,” says Mr Mulino. The United States disagrees. The Trump administration reckons China, not drug gangs, poses the most serious threat to the canal. It wants to drive Chinese activity away from all the critical infrastructure it can in Latin America. Last year it pushed Panama to remove Chinese operators from the ports at each end of the canal. Such “dual-use infrastructure” could be used for “intelligence gathering, cyber vulnerability, or logistical denial during global contingencies”, according to Southcom. Mr Hegseth views Panama as
part of “Greater North America” and part of the “immediate security perimeter”. “The Panama Canal is probably the most important infrastructure in the western hemisphere,” says Kevin Cabrera, America’s ambassador to Panama. “If you wanted to interrupt our commerce, the Panama Canal is the way to mess with that.” Military co-ordination is crucial to defending the waterway, he says. But reviving Jungle School hardly tackles these concerns. American troops cannot stop spying or cyber-attacks by other states. Much bigger numbers of them would be needed to prevent drone attacks or sabotage by terrorists. Instead, increased American meddling may increase risks to the canal. Panamanian schoolchildren are taught that their country’s neutrality is the canal’s best defence, while its openness to all vessels “in times of peace and in times of war” has boosted its role in world trade. Rodrigo Noriega, a local analyst, says Mr Trump’s mercantilism threatens this neutrality, with the result that the chances of the canal being targeted are growing. Mr Cabrera dismisses this. “State and non-state actors don’t care about the rule of law. They don’t care about treaties,” he says.
By contrast, Panama is seeking to bolster the Neutrality Treaty. Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Portugal and Switzerland have signed up. Japan, India and 12 others have been sounded out. Neutrality, Mr Noriega notes, protects Panama not just from physical attacks on its canal, but potentially from Mr Trump’s bullying too. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/the-americas/2026/08/24/donald-trumps-military-expansion- in-panama-makes-little-sense
The problem with the world’s oldest mummies The burial rituals of a culture that thrived 7,000 years ago have ramifications today Aug 27th 2026 Running 600km along the coast of the Atacama desert, from southern Peru to northern Chile, is a mass-burial site for the world’s oldest mummies. The Chinchorro, who lived on the strip of coast from 7000BC to 1000bc, and survived by hunting and fishing, were meticulous preservers of their dead. Almost everyone who died could be mummified, with no regard for social status. This, combined with the dry environment of the Atacama, has led to an odd situation: the world’s oldest deliberately preserved bodies are so numerous that they are creating problems. Lately, more bodies have been emerging from the earth. César Borie is an archaeologist with Chinchorro Marka, an agency that Chile’s government
has charged with the protection of the country’s Chinchorro archaeological sites. He studies a skeleton that he stumbled upon while walking around Caleta Camarones, a town near the city of Arica in northern Chile. “We find new remains exposed every time we come here,” he says, gently reburying the bones with his hands. “Keeping them under the soil until the conditions are right is the best we can do.” This is not a new phenomenon. Chinchorro mummies have been issuing from the ground since at least the early 20th century. Initial expeditions in 1917 transported mummies to museums around Chile, where experts preserved them for study. Archeologists also ran excavations until the 1990s. But erosion caused by extreme winds and increasing human activity nearby has been accelerating the mummies’ exposure. The region has run out of space to receive the bodies and keep them preserved. It would take hundreds of trucks to distribute them all, says Mr Borie. “There is nowhere to keep the mummies in museums without exposing them to damaging light and temperatures,” says Veronica Silva, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in Santiago, Chile’s capital. And so archaeologists keen to learn more about the Chinchorro’s months- long mummification rituals are having to study the bodies in situ, reburying