By virtue of the strength and superiority of the U.S. Navy, most of the world is able to access and navigate international shipping lanes around the globe with relative ease and safety.

Because of that, President Donald Trump believes that all U.S.-flagged ships, including commercial and military vessels, ought to be able to transit the Panama and Suez Canals without having to pay a fee, Breitbart reported.

Both of those canals are vital to U.S. commerce and national security, with the Panama Canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans between North and South America while the Suez Canal links Asia and Europe by connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

U.S. ships should be granted free passage

In a Saturday afternoon Truth Social post, President Trump wrote, "American Ships, both Military and Commercial, should be allowed to travel, free of charge, through the Panama and Suez Canals!"

"Those Canals would not exist without the United States of America," he added. "I’ve asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to immediately take care of, and memorialize, this situation!"

Currently, all vessels that access and traverse the two canals that are crucial in keeping down shipping costs and travel time must pay a fee to the nominally private corporations that control the critical maritime infrastructure projects.

The Panama Canal

Since even before his second term in office began in January, President Trump repeatedly mentioned his desire and intent to reassert U.S. control over the Panama Canal, which the U.S. helped construct in the early 1900s at great cost in terms of money and lives, according to Breitbart.

Formal authority over the Canal was ceded to Panama in the late 1990s, but in recent years and decades it has been the communist Chinese regime and regime-controlled Chinese corporations that have increasingly assumed control of the vital shipping passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Trump has long lamented the fact that U.S.-flagged ships have been compelled to pay a Panamanian company to access and traverse the Canal that Americans previously built but was under the nominal control of China, and efforts have already been launched by the administration to rectify that situation.

The Suez Canal

Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe is the Suez Canal, which was jointly constructed by France and Egypt in the mid-1800s to connect Europe with Asia by way of a connection between the Mediterranean and Red Seas, but that critical passage has increasingly come under threat of attack of a notorious rebel group that controls part of Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula.

Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis, is an Iran-backed terrorist organization that has launched indiscriminate and modestly successful drone and missile attacks against both commercial and military vessels traversing the Red Sea to and from the Suez Canal since late 2023, ostensibly as a show of support for Palestinians and Hamas in their ongoing war against Israel.

According to a report last month from The Japan Times, the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping had become so bad that roughly 75% of U.S.-flagged ships were opting to take the far longer route around the southern tip of Africa -- typically doubling shipping times and adding an extra $1 million in costs -- rather than risk running the Red Sea gauntlet.

That situation is already improving, however, after President Trump ordered the U.S. military last month to launch airstrikes and missile attacks against the Houthis, with the prime goal of significantly reducing and weakening that group's capabilities to threaten international shipping through the region.

It is thanks to the financial strength and military might of the U.S. that much of the world is able to freely navigate important shipping lanes around the globe, and in Trump's view, allowing U.S. ships to pass freely through the Panama and Suez Canals seems like an appropriate and just reward for that substantial contribution to international commerce and security.