Caribbean sovereignty and Donald Trump

stabroeknews.com · Feb 17, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Anton Allahar (Trinidad and Tobago) specializes in nationalism & democracy and Caribbean ethnic and racial relations. He has written and edited twelve books, over 100 refereed articles and book chapters, holds eight major awards for excellence in university teaching and has been visiting professor at 7 universities internationally.Donald Trump’s second term as US president has led many to re-think the concepts of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’ in the Caribbean. Following his recent invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, political pundits in the region have joined in that re-thinking as an armed-to-the-teeth, erratic, out-of-control, seemingly-unstoppable bully, is clearly on the rampage. Given Trump’s flexing of the unrivalled American military muscle these pundits must now reconsider long-standing regional claims to Caribbean ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence.’ In a world where ‘might makes right,’ the puppet leaders of Caribbean puppet states are known for their puffery and their traditionally-vacuous claims about their countries’ ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence.’ The emptiness of such claims is now exposed as pure rhetoric. For example, did the Trinidad & Tobago PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar have any choice about granting the US permission to use Trinidad as a staging ground for the invasion of Venezuela? In all reality, can the St. Lucian PM Philip J. Pierre refuse the US prohibition of St. Lucian students studying medicine in Cuba? Similarly, wanting to sound tough, Jamaican PM Andrew Holness spoke recently at the National Day of Prayer Service at the Power of Faith Ministries, but was quick to note that “his administration is not prepared to get into a dispute with the Trump administration.” In sum, Holness echoed the sentiments of his puppet neighbours when he said that:“We are living in changing times, uncertain times, unchartered waters in many instances. And my job as the steward of your affairs and the servant of your wishes is to keep Jamaica safe, not to steer into waters for which we don’t have to go, not to invite problems on ourselves ….. we give God thanks for keeping Jamaica safe in turbulent geopolitical and geoeconomic times.” Instead of faulting these Caribbean leaders, I argue that they are simply being realistic. For even the fiery Barbados PM Mia Mottley, who charged that the attack on Venezuela “is a blatant breach of the UN charter” and “we are living in a particularly dangerous moment in the world’s affairs” where “large powers will want to show their testicular fortitude,” she could not do or say anything more. For because ‘might makes right,’ that’s about as far as she can go. In other words, Mottley’s defiant defense of the region’s ‘sovereignty’ and ‘independence’ might be seen merely as posturing. For ‘might makes right,’ and echoes the words of the great Chinese leader, Mao Tse-tung: “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” It’s a simple calculus. If your gun is bigger than my gun you have more power. And in the Caribbean we simply have no guns of which to speak; we are at the mercy of the US.Today the biggest guns are known collectively as ‘nuclear’ and ‘tactical nuclear’ weapons. But beyond these there are also a whole host of other lethal weapons: smart bombs, drones, kinetic and non-kinetic weapons, chemical and biological arsenals and those weapons used recently in Venezuela that Trump referred to as ‘discombobulators,’ which can knock out a country’s electrical grid, disable communication and sow targeted chaos etc. The owners of those biggest weapons are the US, Russia and China. But there are others such as France and the UK along with India, Pakistan and North Korea, whose stockpiles are fewer. Then there is Israel whose nuclear weapons cache is secret but can also count on the 100% unquestioned support of the US big guns.This said, I have argued that, save for Cuba, no Caribbean country is sovereign. The people of a sovereign country are said to be a sovereign people, a people who are not subject to the whimsical wishes or desires of another country. Thus, when I say that Cuba is the only sovereign country in the region it is because Cuba is the only Caribbean country that has been able to defy the US for 67 years, the latter’s criminal and immoral blockade notwithstanding. And although Cuba is not known to have nuclear or tactical nuclear weapons, it is not totally unarmed or defenceless, and it is only 90 miles from Florida. For this reason the US will think twice before launching a military attack and has opted instead to use its big guns to threaten Cuba’s non-sovereign Caribbean neighbours and prohibit them from rendering any form of assistance, even humanitarian, to the Cubans. With its bigger guns the US is able to violate Cuba’s sovereignty and tighten its illegal and immoral blockade of the country. These new ‘pirates of the Caribbean’ have thus seized Venezuelan, Mexican, Iranian etc. oil tankers, have stolen the oil and are selling it on the market while keeping the proceeds for themselves. High seas robbery!As an aside, I must specify a distinction between internal sovereignty and external sovereignty. ‘Internal sovereignty’ speaks to the power a sovereign leader or monarch wields with regard to his/her own people whereas ‘external sovereignty’ concerns the power of a sovereign to violate the rights and wishes of the people and government of another country. Viewed in this way the leaders of Caribbean countries need to understand the difference between ‘claiming sovereignty’ and actually ‘being sovereign.’ Sovereignty is not absolute but may be measured in ‘degrees of power, domination and control’ possessed by a given sovereign vis-à-vis his/her own population.Thus, after 67 years of blockade and covert attempts at killing the Cuban leadership, today the Cuban revolution is facing a serious existential threat. Its population is being squeezed, essential services like hospitals and health clinics are severely curtailed, most medicines are unavailable, schools and offices are closed, public transit is almost nonexistent, neighbourhood markets and grocery shelves are empty, electrical power is almost totally cut off, tourism (the main source of foreign exchange) is all but shut down and daily life is thrown into total upheaval.The US hope is that this will turn Cubans against one another, will lead to a mass uprising against the government and then the US can move in ‘to save the day’ and re-take ownership of the country and all its rich resources. This crippling of the Cuban society and economy is called democratization! Totally ignored, however, is that under international humanitarian law, specifically the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols, it is illegal to use food and medicine as weapons of war. Starving civilians and blocking humanitarian aid, as the US and Israel are doing in Palestine (Gaza), constitute war crimes, but when the criminal has the biggest guns they can get away with all manner of crime. Trump has already said that the UN is feckless, that NATO is nothing without the US, and we all know that the US has the power to refuse to be subject to the rulings of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Mao Tse-tung must be smiling in his grave and saying to himself, “I told you so.” Based on the foregoing, I question the so-called ‘independence’ of the Caribbean countries. Indeed, aHegseth s the histories of the US and Cuba show, independence must be seized or won, most often from the clutches of reluctant oppressors. ‘Independence’ presumes sovereignty and no sovereign state needs another to “grant” it its freedom. Thus, when Britain “gave” Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados, and Guyana, among others, their independence 50-plus years ago, the gesture was empty. The economies of these countries are dependent capitalist economies and their fates are governed by outside interests and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and a handful of powerful economic actors (e.g. Nvidia, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft). And when economic domination is insufficient, those interests have the military might of the US and its imperialist allies behind them.The former colonies of the Caribbean are now neo-colonies and the old colonial masters (England, France, Spain, Netherlands etc.), are still calling the shots. And in spite of all their leaders’ grandiose claims and posturing, the various countries of the Caribbean are not independent, but rather, as Norman Girvan once described them: they are “countries in-dependence.” Stated differently, when the former colonies were able to run local elections, have local political parties that elected local Prime Ministers, who appointed local cabinets and local judges etc., that was only part of the picture of formal political independence and did not signal an end to outside control, or for that matter, an end to dependence on outside instructions for running internal affairs.Thus, 50-plus years after political independence in Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados and Guyana, only five of twelve contracting countries – Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana and Saint Lucia – have the Caribbean Court of Justice as the final court of appeal. For the remainder, the England-based Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is still the highest court of appeal. And even after the CCJ comes to replace the Privy Council across the region, what about all those areas in which the Caribbean countries do not have jurisdiction or control over their own economic resources that remain in the hands of foreign multinational corporations that do not answer to a Caribbean electorate? Hence my charge is that as a region, even though Antigua & Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts/Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, and Trinidad & Tobago appear on a list that identifies “sovereign and independent states worldwide” (http://