USA HISTORY

The Panama Canal must be fortified. It would have been criminal to build it if we were not prepared to fortify it and to keep our navy at such a pitch of strength as to render it unsafe for any foreign power to attack us and get control of it.-Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

(A) to expand colonial holdings

(B) to protect the environment

(C) ** to maintain national security

(D) to increase the regional trade

Concept note-1: -More than a century ago, the opening of the Panama Canal revolutionized international trade by making it much quicker and easier to travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Concept note-2: -During the Spanish-American War, an American warship had steamed around the Cape from California to the Caribbean, igniting public imagination and providing an additional military justification for supporters of the canal, whose primary interest remained trade.

Concept note-3: -In 1903, the United States negotiated a treaty with Colombia that granted the United States the right to construct and operate a canal for 100 years within a zone six-miles wide across Panama.

Concept note-4: -Anti-imperialists called the US hypocritical for condemning European empires while pursuing one of its own. The war was supposed to be about freeing Cuba, not seizing the Philippines.