Not con­sid­ered wor­thy of be­ing list­ed in Unit­ed States Pres­i­dent James Mon­roe’s Doc­trine of 200 years ago—a doc­u­ment which warned Eu­ro­pean coun­tries to stay out of the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean re­gion as it made up the Amer­i­can “back­yard”—Chi­na has in re­cent years moved in­to the hemi­sphere and is plan­ning a big ex­pan­sion.

How­ev­er, in his at­tempts to pre­serve his 19th-cen­tu­ry pre­de­ces­sor’s mark­ing off of ter­ri­to­ry for the Amer­i­can hege­mon, Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump has im­posed re­stric­tions, even bar­ri­ers against Chi­nese trade to the Caribbean, as well as that go­ing through the Pana­ma Canal.

Clear­ly not feel­ing im­per­illed by the orig­i­nal Amer­i­can claim and not dis­turbed by the trade bar­ri­ers be­ing erect­ed, Chi­na’s Pres­i­dent Xi Jin­ping an­nounced re­cent­ly that his coun­try will “join hands” with Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries “in the face of seething un­der­cur­rents of pure po­lit­i­cal and bloc con­fronta­tion and the surg­ing tide of uni­lat­er­al­ism and pro­tec­tion­ism.”

Quite a state­ment of in­ten­tion by the Chi­nese leader, but what is go­ing to be the re­sponse of Pres­i­dent Trump, more so now that his tar­iff war on world eco­nom­ic in­ter­ac­tion has not had the kind of ef­fect that he in­tend­ed?

Con­trary to his ear­ly boast that lead­ers around the world were call­ing him and beg­ging for trade mer­cies against the tar­iffs, Chi­na has con­front­ed his bloc re­stric­tions and es­tab­lished its own counter-tar­iffs.

While all of the above and more have been go­ing back and forth, both coun­tries have low­ered their tar­iffs and en­gaged in a 90-day truce while the tech­nocrats ne­go­ti­ate a way for­ward.

One of the ma­jor is­sues must sure­ly be whether or not Pres­i­dent Trump will seek to keep in place the 1823 Mon­roe Doc­trine of the hemi­sphere be­ing un­der the con­trol of the US, or yield to the 21st cen­tu­ry free trade phi­los­o­phy of glob­al­i­sa­tion, which frees the coun­tries of the world to trade across geo-po­lit­i­cal bound­aries.

In stat­ing his own phi­los­o­phy, Pres­i­dent Xi must have earned quite a mea­sure of en­thu­si­asm for plans for the hemi­sphere. His in­ten­tion is to al­low the cur­rent US$500 mil­lion trade with the re­gion to ex­pand and to in­clude such items as soya beans, beef, en­er­gy prod­ucts and mod­ern telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works. He al­so an­nounced Chi­na’s plans to award 3,500 ed­u­ca­tion­al schol­ar­ships to peo­ple of the hemi­sphere as part of the coun­try’s Belt and Road Ini­tia­tive.

The Chi­nese pres­i­dent al­so an­nounced the re­moval of visa re­stric­tions from five coun­tries of the hemi­sphere for trav­el to Chi­na. It’s an ap­proach by Chi­na that is in di­rect con­trast to that of this US ad­min­is­tra­tion, which has in­clud­ed the re­gion in its swathe of tar­iffs which can on­ly dis­tort trade and in­crease the cost of liv­ing to cit­i­zens and res­i­dents.

Liv­ing in these times, we around the world are privy to this con­fronta­tion be­tween con­trolled and free trade—the for­mer dom­i­nat­ed by the eco­nom­i­cal­ly and mil­i­tar­i­ly pow­er­ful Unit­ed States, the lat­ter seek­ing to cre­ate a new world of trad­ing in the in­ter­est of peo­ple and na­tions around the world.

Caribbean lead­ers, while not hav­ing the kind of clout that those of large Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries have, must see their fu­ture in an in­ter­na­tion­al sys­tem which al­lows for the un­hing­ing from pre­vi­ous philoso­phies of dom­i­na­tion in trade, pol­i­tics and hu­man de­vel­op­ment as cit­i­zens of the world.