We took the territory and built the canal. America and its people in those days were young, energetic, happy, glorious, expanding and did lay down the law to foreign nations.
Today Jimmy Carter filled with Love and Tolerance, the American people living a life of eating, drinking, drugging, copulating, evacuating their bowels and snoring did not even notice what the decadent Carter and a bankrupt Congress did in surrendering the Canal to foreigners. There is a price to pay for degeneration and the Canal symbolizes , in part, that price.
But wasn’t the original deal between the US and Panama, that the US would control the canal for something like 75 years, after which the US would relinquish control of the canal to Panama?
You forgot induced vomitting so one could do these things all over again.