The vis­it of US Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen­er­al Dan Caine, to meet with Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar is sig­nif­i­cant for Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Nev­er be­fore has a sit­ting Chair­man of the Joint Chiefs, the high­est-rank­ing mil­i­tary of­fi­cer in the Unit­ed States and ad­vi­sor to the US Pres­i­dent, made an of­fi­cial stop in Port-of-Spain.

The rel­e­vance lies less in cer­e­mo­ny and more in what it sig­nals about the cur­rent geopo­lit­i­cal mo­ment.

For one, the vis­it re­flects the marked deep­en­ing of en­gage­ment be­tween this coun­try and the Unit­ed States.

Since the Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar-led Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress Gov­ern­ment took of­fice on April 28, Port-of-Spain has found it­self in more fre­quent and high­er-lev­el con­tact with Wash­ing­ton than in re­cent years.

In Sep­tem­ber, the Prime Min­is­ter held di­rect talks with US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio. This re­sult­ed in Ru­bio and oth­er of­fi­cials speak­ing pub­licly in Wash­ing­ton about T&T’s grow­ing align­ment with the US on re­gion­al se­cu­ri­ty is­sues, par­tic­u­lar­ly those to do with drug traf­fick­ing and Venezuela.

This no­tice­able diplo­mat­ic align­ment has led to height­ened mil­i­tary co-op­er­a­tion be­tween T&T and the US. In the space of a month, US Marines con­duct­ed two ma­jor rounds of train­ing with the T&T De­fence Force - first dur­ing the vis­it of the USS Grave­ly, and lat­er through ad­di­tion­al ex­er­cis­es in­volv­ing the 22nd Ma­rine Ex­pe­di­tionary Unit - at a time when the US has in­creased its mil­i­tary pres­ence in the Caribbean Sea.

It is with­in that con­text that Gen­er­al Caine’s brief stopover in T&T, which was added to a trip orig­i­nal­ly in­tend­ed on­ly for Puer­to Ri­co and the USS Lake Erie, takes on added sig­nif­i­cance.

For com­par­i­son, even the late US Gen­er­al Col­in Pow­ell’s vis­its to T&T in 1998 and 2011 oc­curred af­ter he had left of­fice.

Caine’s de­ci­sion to come now, there­fore, will not go un­no­ticed, ei­ther in the re­gion, in Cara­cas, or across the globe.

It sug­gests that Wash­ing­ton views T&T as a coun­try worth en­gag­ing at the high­est op­er­a­tional lev­el at this time, a po­si­tion strength­ened by this coun­try’s strong sup­port for the cur­rent US mil­i­tary pos­ture in the re­gion.

Of course, not all in T&T agree with the Gov­ern­ment’s close em­brace of Wash­ing­ton’s stance to­wards Venezuela - our clos­est neigh­bour - adding a lay­er of do­mes­tic com­plex­i­ty to this deep­en­ing re­la­tion­ship.

But we are al­ready here, and if T&T is now firm­ly on Wash­ing­ton’s radar, the broad­er ques­tion is whether this mo­ment can pro­duce mean­ing­ful long-term ben­e­fits.

A coun­try of our size can­not af­ford to treat se­cu­ri­ty co-op­er­a­tion as an end in it­self. It must serve as a gate­way to deep­er eco­nom­ic, de­vel­op­men­tal, and tech­no­log­i­cal part­ner­ships that strength­en na­tion­al ca­pac­i­ty long af­ter this cur­rent pe­ri­od of geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sion has passed.

Nat­u­ral­ly, what­ev­er the time­line for US op­er­a­tions in the re­gion, their ves­sels will even­tu­al­ly with­draw or re­de­ploy.

When they do, the hope is that to­day’s co-op­er­a­tion leaves be­hind a more en­dur­ing se­cu­ri­ty ar­chi­tec­ture, cou­pled with stronger in­sti­tu­tions and con­crete eco­nom­ic op­por­tu­ni­ties, and not sim­ply a coun­try caught in the un­der­tow of larg­er pow­ers’ pri­or­i­ties.