The surprising object lesson: hard-headed Scotland, which in the 17th century attempted to build an overland trading route across the isthmus of Panama starting in an area known as Darien.

FORBES: When Scotland Lost Its Mind

This reinforced the Americans' desire to build and control a canal across the isthmus of Panama, so that their ships could move between the Atlantic and the Pacific without going all the way round Cape Horn (as the American battleship Oregon had to do during the war).

ECONOMIST: THE WAR OF 1898

Ortega's forces are dredging the river as part of an Iranian-sponsored project to build a canal along the Isthmus of Nicaragua that will rival the Panama Canal.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Why Latin America turned

Panama and to block eventual control of the isthmus by interests allied with Communist China.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Panama slipping into China��s ready grasp?

Fresh from constructing a sea-level canal through the flat Egyptian sand, de Lesseps was determined, without having set foot in Panama and after only the vaguest of topographical studies, that his project through the mountainous central American isthmus would also be a sea-level canal, requiring no locks to cope with changes in altitude.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal