On November 29, in the context of the saga of Washington’s pressure campaign on leftist Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s government (chavismo’s principal torchbearer),US President Donald Trump issued a warning that Venezuelan airspace should be considered closed—prompting backlash from Caracas and its allies. (Indeed, Washington’s stance towards Venezuela has received plenty of pushback from Cuba and others.)
This comes against a backdrop where the Trump Pentagon’s “Operation Southern Spear” has apparently shifted gears, with direct attacks on Venezuela now a very real possibility. Just recently, Trump reportedly gave Maduro an ultimatum to relinquish power in Venezuela.
For analysts of U.S. foreign policy, the “march toward regime change in Venezuela” is in the air, and there is heightened concern over “the day after.”
In coming at the Venezuelan regime, a poster child for international actors that have run afoul of Trump 2.0 foreign policy aims, Washington counts on go-to smaller nations in the Caribbean Basin.
The United States’ ties to Trinidad and Tobago—which is a leading member state of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) bloc, comprising 14 of some of the world’s smallest states—since September have been crucial to Trump’s policy toward Venezuela. This policy has unfolded in an escalatory manner—primarily in the Caribbean.
Having caused alarm inside this regional grouping in the early goings, with Washington seemingly unfazed by the associated misgivings of virtually all of the bloc’s leaders about that policy, related concerns have only deepened.
Undeterred by those concerns and the associated controversies, and according to CARICOM insiders at the risk of exacerbating sharp foreign policy divergence with sister states of the Caricom bloc, Trinidad and Tobago has been drawn deeper into the Trump administration’s Western hemisphere-related security calculus.
Guyana, a Caricom member state that has a contiguous and contested border with Venezuela, has also lent its support to the US military’s scaled up presence in the Caribbean. This is at a time when Georgetown and Washington are strengthening their bilateral security partnership.
Perhaps most important, an old truth made new by this geopolitical moment, is that Washington’s dealings with Caricom member states represent less a break with the past than a familiar pattern. While the dynamics that underpin this moment are not unprecedented, instructively, Trump’s Venezuelan gambit brings the Caribbean to the front burner of America’s securitisation efforts.
Trinidad and Tobago’s experience relative to the U.S. pressure campaign against Venezuela stands out. Now, according to recent reporting, this country’s government “has approved the installation of a US military radar installation.” Other Caricom member states, though, have demurred in that regard.
The upshot is for months, along with some other Caribbean territories, Caricom member states have been in the eye of the storm of a new era of America’s securitised dealings with the wider Latin American and Caribbean region. So much is at stake for these small states’ interests in this era — namely, a spheres of influence-related redux that is anathema to the rules-based liberal international order — not least because their foreign policy (choices) could be constrained in far-reaching ways.
What is more, stemming from this US-Venezuelan foreign policy episode, regional unity has taken a serious hit. Far from bringing Caricom member states closer, yet another chapter of US military actions in the Caribbean has resulted in regional polarization. Having attracted Trinidad and Tobago’s full-throated support, Washington’s latest Venezuelan gambit has cut away at the bloc’s capacity to speak with one voice against interventionism.
It is notable that CARICOM leaders strongly condemned Russia’s full-scale war of aggression in Ukraine when it was launched in February 2022, urging a “return to mature diplomacy” in order “to propel an urgent and enduring resolution to the conflict and to build peace.” In the period since, their respective countries have consistently turned to international organisations — which have an outsized place in these states’ diplomatic playbook — to contribute to the international community’s ongoing efforts to bring the conflict to an end.
Caricom member states have a long record of such diplomatic positioning, having stridently pushed back against the Iraq War.
The real question now is not whether Caricom will emerge from Washington’s latest bid to tighten the squeeze on the Maduro regime unscathed, but what this moment portends for this regional integration project going forward, all things considered. Already, with regard to a widening schism between those in the bloc who would hold the line on the multilateralist-based foundations of the bloc’s traditional approach to international relations and those who would shift it, Caricom is morphing right before our eyes.
Fundamentally, this question calls attention to how foreign policy issues of the day and the bloc’s attempts to grapple with such issues have a bearing on Caricom’s unity on the international stage. In the case of the now months-long intensification of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign targeting the Maduro regime, Caricom’s leaders have increasingly been signaling that a commonly-held, bloc-supported red line on Washington’s regime change ambitions targeting Venezuela does not obtain.
More broadly, and leaning on a small states-anchored international relations’ prism, Caricom’s uniformly clear-cut view regarding the nexus of power and multilateralism has seemingly been muddied.
While this reality augurs badly for the bloc, things could get considerably worse still — and in short order. Notably, Washington’s regime change-related foreign policy cudgel is hardly sui generis in respect of Venezuela. Cuba’s communist government, brought to power by the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution and in the crosshairs of Trump administration Cuba hawks, may well be next in line.
If so, and bearing in mind that the Trump administration will no doubt come calling again on Caricom member states to lend requisite support, Washington setting its sights on and attempting regime change in Cuba would likely shake Caricom to its core.
If such a change were to be attempted by the Trump administration, partly by angling for the backing of Caricom member states, the bloc would feel the whiplash of response from a cross-section of quarters in the international community on an altogether different order of magnitude than the Venezuelan case has already generated.
In such a scenario, a strong response can also be expected from within Caricom itself. Any keen observer of Caricom-Cuba relations will attest to the deep and expansive bonds that hold those relations in place, drawing especially on the theme of post-colonial development. It is a relationship that is also historically significant, as well as being of crucial importance for the small states of Caricom in both the contemporary domestic and international policy spaces. (In the case of Caricom member states’ respective bilateral relations with Venezuela, though, the diplomatic experiences have been considerably varied.)
Suffice it to say, in their decades-long post-colonial journey, Caricom member states have marched in lockstep on Cuba policy. Should Caricom member states potentially fall out of step on Cuba, resulting from a possible Cuba-specific pressure campaign that may have overtones à la the United States’ Venezuelan-related interventionism, the costs visited on Caricom unity would certainly eclipse those associated with the Venezuelan imbroglio.
Such a prospective development constitutes just one of several unintended consequences that stem from the imbroglio in question, which largely triggers fears of resultant Caribbean costs.
