“…approximately 27,000 Ministry of Public Security personnel (2023)” in the Panamanian Public Forces the according to the CIA World Factbook, and somewhere around 50,000 part time and reservists (from IISS as of 2012). Not enough to resist a major invasion force or even the aforementioned Marine Expeditionary Force or even a Brigade-sized force, but enough that it would take a significant operation to invade and hold. And again, an invasion force isn’t going to be able to maintain operations of the canal or make them more cost-effective, which of course is the entire justification for doing this in the first place.
Even if they do (I suspect we’ll have elections just because they are run at the state level, and represent some notional continuum with Constitutional governance) they are going to be gerrymandered as fuck in every ‘Red’ state, and possibly results contested at the Congressional level if they are anything but favorable to MAGA ‘conservatives’ (who are anything but conservative in any genuine sense of the term).
It is far from the first “REALLY BAD NEWS” but one thing Trump et al has vowed to do and will for certain follow through with is defunding and dismantling all climate monitoring, modeling, and public communication and education efforts, as well as shutting down any efforts to prepare for the impacts of climate change (of which the Department of Defense is one of the biggest participants because while the military isn’t composed of a bunch of tree-huggers the impacts upon national security and defense operations are quite evident to planners who have been looking at these problems since the mid-‘Nineties). As much as anything Trump will do to harm this country, this is the one that has the most significant, long lasting, and devastating impacts, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about most of it except to maintain whatever programs can be supported at state-level government.
Maybe the ‘hopeful skeptics’ will get their magic trick and Trump chokes on a chicken wing while Democrats take over both houses of Congress in a 2026 ‘Blue Tsunami’, and maybe even there is a natural disaster that wipes out several particular members of the Supreme Court and a sane leader wins the presidency in 2028, and nominates fair and impartial candidates for the Court that are embraced in an unexpected wave of bipartisanism. But the loss of programs, lack of preparation, and erosion of knowledge about the effects and status of the climate will be with us indefinitely, curtailing effective measures we might take to mitigate the worst impacts, and emplace systems and empower people to work toward resilience.
Stranger