NEWSOURCE21

The Geopolitics of Canals : Geography Engineered for Global Trade

Creating the Ultimate Shortcut Part I

The Geopolitical Pickle

Introduction

The famous 20th-century geopolitical thinker Nicholas Spykman said of geography: “It is the most fundamentally conditioning factor in the formulation of national policy because it is the most permanent. Ministers come, and ministers go, even dictators die, but mountain ranges stand unperturbed.” Or, as others would later characterize his theory, “geography does not argue; it just is.” While this sentiment captures the centrality of geography to a state’s foreign policy, it is not quite right that geography is static: humans have ways of bending nature to serve their interests, while technological advances also serves to underwrite geographic constraints. The most important example of this is humanity’s mastery of water, both in moving it from where it was to where it was needed, and in using it to move resources.

The history of canals

Layout of a canal (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Darius the Great of Persia built the first true canal, linking the Nile River to the Red Sea in 510 BCE. This was preceded by irrigation in ancient Mesopotamia in 4000 BCE and aqueducts in Assyria in 690 BCE. Not long after, the ancient Chinese Grand Canal system began, linking the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, and the agricultural south with the economic and political capitals in the north. The Chinese Grand Canal wins as the oldest manmade canal in the world still in use. The Chinese also invented the pound lock (called because they impound water), which became a standard on modern canals, with some improvements along the way, including by Leonardo da Vinci. Locks are needed to artificially raise or lower water levels along a canal when nature doesn’t oblige. They are basically liquid elevators, or liquid escalators if a series of locks is required, such as the five-lock system along the Three Gorges Dam in China that collectively raise a vessel 113m from where it begins.

The Three Gorges Dam, ship lift, and lock systems (Yangtze River Cruises)

The Europeans entered the canal game in the Middle Ages, led by the Italians and the masters of water movers – the Dutch. Called the “Low Countries” because much of their land is below sea level, the Dutch used their canals primarily for drainage, with transport a bonus.

Modern canals

The two most famous canals today are the Suez and Panama Canals. For both constructions, the conditions for the local laborers were brutal and often fatal. But engineering-wise, the two could not be more different. The Suez Canal was a relatively straightforward project completed by the French in 1869 after just ten years of work, requiring no locks. Connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, both of which are conveniently at the same altitude, with some inland lakes helping. The Panama Canal, despite being half as long as the Suez, was orders of magnitude more arduous, dangerous, and requiring engineering miracles. Digging through dense, disease-infested jungle, the Panama Canal needed six locks – 3 on each end – to shuttle ships through.

The Suez Canal builder, Ferdinand Lesseps, tried and failed for six years in the 1880s to construct a canal through the Panamanian Isthmus. After the French threw in the towel, the U.S. wanted a turn, but first they had to gain access to the land. The territory that would become Panama was then part of Colombia. After Colombia would not sell the territory to the U.S., President Teddy Roosevelt helped orchestrate a revolution in Panama against Colombia in 1903, all so that the newly created country of Panama could then allow the U.S. its shot at building the canal. Some skullduggery serving geopolitical needs (something the Washington has never been too averse to). It took another decade of grueling digging and thousands of deaths to complete the Panama Canal in 1914, but its completion changed the world’s geography forever.

Why canals are important

While irrigation and aqueducts move water to where it is needed, canals are less about moving water and more about moving resources via water. Transport by water has almost always been more efficient than land transport. Large vessels can be weighed down with thousands of tons of cargo and still float to their destination. Sea transport still accounts for over 80% of transport today, and this has been the general trend throughout history. Back in the mid-1800s, Britain controlled two important chokepoints of trade with India and Southeast Asia: the Strait of Gibraltar at the mouth of the Mediterranean, and the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa. (Understand the worlds most important chokepoints here: https://thegeopoliticalpickle.substack.com/p/the-pickle-perspective-global-shipping)

France, hoping to counter Britain’s sea dominance, saw a very elegant solution. By cutting through a tiny strip of Egypt via the Suez, they could literally cut Africa out of the trade route, bypassing both the need to sail past Gibraltar from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic and around Britain-controlled Cape Town. Rulers of Egypt throughout history, from the ancient pharaohs to the aforementioned Darius the Great to Napoleon, all saw the value in constructing such a canal. Once the Suez Canal was completed, the British immediately understood the value in the Suez’s ability to shorten the journey to India by 4,000 miles.

By 1875, a mere 6 years after its opening, Britain had bought Egypt’s 44% stake in the canal, making it the largest shareholder. Shortened journeys may have been the primary goal, but the certainty of ships arriving without having to sail around the southern tip of Africa was an additional benefit. The Cape of Good Hope was originally called the “Cape of Storms” by the Portuguese explorer who first sailed around it in 1488, because of its dangerous conditions. The Portuguese king was said to have renamed it to its current name because a voyage around the Cape of Good Hope sounds much more optimistic.

The building of the Panama Canal was almost entirely the U.S. wanting to have its east and west coasts more connected. Before the Transcontinental Railroad was finished in 1869, there were only three options of getting from the U.S. economic centers on the east coast to the newly acquired territories and states like California on the west coast: 1) overland by covered wagon through harsh terrain (like crossing the Rocky Mountains), and Native American-occupied territory; 2) aboard a ship that had to sail all the way around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America, or 3) a ship to Panama, and overland crossing of the isthmus jungle, and then another ship north.

The Transcontinental Railroad shortened the cross-country journey to just seven days, but while a railroad could haul people and some smaller cargo, the U.S. needed the ability for its navy to get from one ocean to another in the quickest possible time. This point was highlighted in 1899 in the Spanish-American War. The warship USS Oregon, stationed in San Francisco, needed 66 days to sail around Cape Horn (another storm-filled passage) to get to Cuba to join the fight against Spain.

The face of the Spanish-American War was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and future U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt, who, during his presidency, was the person pushing the strongest for the Panama Canal. It will not surprise readers of geopolitics that one of Roosevelt’s close friends and confidants was Captain Alfred T. Mahan, one of the fathers of geopolitics, who believed that sea power, above all else, was the key to geopolitical superiority. Read more about Mahan and his geopolitical theories, and influence on sea power here: https://thegeopoliticalpickle.substack.com/p/naval-power-and-the-sea-the-rise

Pre-canal, when Commodore Perry made his famous voyage to Tokyo in the 1850s, he did not depart from the West Coast and cross the Pacific. Instead, he left from Virginia and had to travel across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Indian Ocean, and eventually into the western Pacific and Japan. That three-ocean voyage to reach Asia would no longer be necessary. The U.S. could now literally cut off South America in its journey from sea to shining sea and truly become a two-ocean naval power.

When ships get bigger, so must canals

After World War II came the rise of shipping containers as the primary means for maritime trade. We covered this extensively in our previous article on ports (https://thegeopoliticalpickle.substack.com/p/ports-and-geopolitics). These ships can approach 400 meters in length, 61 meters wide, and 33 meters deep, which means they dwarf the ship sizes when the Suez and Panama Canals were first constructed.

Key to maritime shipping efficiency was expanding the canals to fit the size of these ships. In 2017, after ten years of work on possibly the greatest infrastructure project of the new millennium, the government of Panama successfully expanded the Canal, including construction of new locks, that doubled its capacity to see ships through the passage.

Currently, there are three lanes: two parallel lanes in the original locks and a third lane for the newer, larger-capacity locks. The historic lanes can now fit these huge container ships, called Panamax, and the largest lane can fit the even larger class of ships called the NeoPanamax, if only just barely. When traversing the locks near Panama City, special pilots are required to guide these huge ships through, since the clearance on each side of the ship can be measured in inches rather than feet. The first photo is an overhead view, while the second one is the author’s own from 2019, witnessing this feat of modern engineering and ship steering in action.

Aerial view of a container ship passing through the canal from the Panama Canal Authority

Author’s own photo of a container ship passing through (2019)

Not for nothing, these new locks are also designed to significantly reduce water usage. This has become incredibly important because current low water levels from El Niño have forced the Canal operators to reduce the number of ships that can pass through the canal daily. Normally, the Canal has a daily capacity of 40 ships. However, due to these lower water levels, the number of ships allowed through was reduced to 32 for September 2026, and it will be increased only to 33 ships daily for October. While a 7-8 ship difference might seem small, consider the thousands of tons of cargo each of these ships carries, and it adds up quite quickly. The Suez Canal similarly expanded in 2015 to accommodate these larger ships, taking just under a year (no locks required!) to finish the project.

Conclusion

Spykman’s axiom that “geography just is” is a great starting point for understanding the importance of canals. The Earth is 71% covered by water. This percentage will only go up as sea levels rise, which means we can take it as a given that maritime transport will remain supremely important in global trade in the long term. That part of geography “just is.” What humans can do is change that geography in tiny ways that have large impacts. Dig a mere 82km across Panama, and two oceans are now connected. Cut 193km across Egypt, and you can cut out needing to sail around Africa. Routes are shorter, cheaper, and less dangerous, and the world is better connected. With this framing in mind, next week we will explore the importance of canals as controlling or bypassing chokepoints.