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Perspective Shift

You read this story from where you sit.
Want to read it from somewhere else?

We'll re-present the same story as a thoughtful proponent of the openness-as-engine frame would. Not to convince you. To let you actually meet the argument.

Choose a vantage
Openness-as-engine frame
Panama City's wealth wasn't built by protectionism but by leaning into its geography as a corridor — moving goods, capital, and people freely is what produced the skyline, the ports, and one of Latin America's highest GDPs per capita.
Continuity-of-trade-history frame
The canal didn't invent Panama; indigenous routes, Spanish silver convoys, the 1855 railroad, and the modern logistics hub are all chapters of the same story — a narrow isthmus that has always made its living from connecting oceans.
Rebuke-to-protectionism frame
As tariffs, industrial policy, and Trump's musings about retaking the canal reframe trade routes as strategic assets to be controlled, Panama stands as a living counterexample showing that prosperity follows connection, not coercion.
Retold from the other vantage
Steelman · slot A
The openness dividend
A market-liberal development economist would argue —
Look at what Panama actually did and what it actually got. After the canal returned to Panamanian hands in 1999, the country didn't wall it off or treat it as a national-champion industry to be milked — it integrated the waterway with the Colón Free Trade Zone, port concessions, an airline hub, and one of the region's most permissive financial centers. The 2016 lock expansion doubled down on that bet. The result is a GDP per capita near the top of Latin America and a skyline that looks like Miami's because the underlying economic logic is the same: make it cheap and easy for goods, capital, and people to move through you, and the rents accrue. Protectionism would have produced a poorer, more captured Panama.

If this read like a fair rendering of the argument — even when you disagree — it's doing its job. Steelmen aren't aimed at persuading you; they're aimed at what the other side actually believes when they're thinking clearly.