Recent multilateral meetings in Kingston and Mar-a-Lago signal US attempts at intensifying divisions in the Caribbean. ‘Shithole countries’ (as president Donald Trump allegedly labeled Haiti and many other poor third world countries) can be important allies for undermining those states targeted for regime change.

Trump’s former national security advisor John Bolton has spoken openly about US and regional businesspeople benefiting financially from a toppling of Venezuela’s government and a privatization of its petroleum industry. Venezuela has the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Over recent decades, the Caribbean has experienced profound change, propelled by new digital technologies, hi-tech remittance networks, new global cultural and media flows, low-cost mass travel and tourism, expanding real estate markets, and new banking and financial arrangements.

People across the region are propelled into the clutches of globalization with mounting inequality and climate change taking a severe toll on their lives. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other brewing worldwide crises such as those stemming from automation and artificial intelligence, nuclear proliferation, and a lack of regional and global coordination around many issues (the latest being coronavirus).

It’s in this context that US officials are seeking to intensify geopolitical divisions in the region, most notably in order to promote its policy of regime change targeting Venezuela. US plans to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro failed utterly in 2019, yet an intensification of its economic terror campaign looms even as it continues to be the key factor that hinders Venezuela’s recovery.

The South American country has suffered tremendously, pushing many to emigrate. While Venezuela has only had tens of coronavirus cases, the country’s health system has been battered by US sanctions and will face difficulties if the virus spreads.

Facing constant attack, dramatically intensified since August of 2017 when the US imposed financial sanctions, Venezuela has been forced to rely on investment and support from Chinese and Russian state enterprises. By June of 2018, Caracas had halted around half of its crude oil shipments around the Caribbean.

A part of the US strategy has been to undermine the viability of Venezuela’s subsidized-ALBA project as a regional developmental alternative to the IMF and other neoliberal financial institutions.

ALBA itself has faced many internal problems. Yet in late 2019, ALBA leaders declared that in 2020 they would relaunch PetroCaribe, the Children’s Heart Hospitals, its eye surgery program and school of medicine.

Thus far, though pummeled, the remaining leaders and left-leaning movements and parties of some regional states have not given in to Washington’s offensive. Historically many officials in the Caribbean region have argued for the region to be ‘nuclear-free’ and a ‘Zone of Peace’, yet this has always been contradicted by the fact that so many identify with the West and are located in the US geopolitical sphere. The most vocal exceptions are Cuba (since the 1959 revolution), and Grenada (from 1979 to 1983 under the short-lived People’s Revolutionary Government of Maurice Bishop).

Over recent decades, many Caribbean political parties have shifted away from their disparate ideological roots. Instead they have moved towards promoting economic models emphasizing exports and tourism. Many state elites, with the support of supranational institutions, have sought to focus on creating conditions that attract transnational corporate investors. While participants in ALBA in part promote an alternative developmental stream, they also must regularly juggle close relationships with big business.

CARICOM and the Caribbean

In July 1973, four of the newly independent and leading sovereign states in the English-speaking Caribbean, Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, all signed on to the Treaty of Chaguaramas. In later years, the other CARICOM states would sign on. Among the provisions of the established treaty the states are expected to coordinate their foreign policies on matters of regional and international import.

Moving in the exact opposite direction, Trump met with five Caribbean leaders at Mar-a-lago in South Florida in March of 2019, and, following that, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo met with Caribbean officials in Kingston, Jamaica in January of 2020.

The meetings signaled US attempts to intensify geopolitical divisions. One Reuters headline read bluntly: Trump dangles investment to Caribbean leaders who back Venezuela’s Guaido.

Last week the Organization of American States narrowly voted to accept a representative of Venezuela’s parallel government to the organization’s permanent council. @JebSprague & @gregwilpert discuss #HandsOffVenezuela #VenezuelaCoup https://t.co/UywKggEPX7

          — The Real News (@TheRealNews) April 19, 2019

By signing on to US policy undermining Venezuela, and supporting the interventionist demands of the heavily-US funded OAS, divisions in the region have been further widened. For Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Saint Lucia, it may even constitute a violation of Article 12 and Article 16 of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, for which they are signatories.

Divisions have occurred in the past. The 1983 US invasion of Grenada was one of the more divisive matters in the region, with some states such as Trinidad and Tobago opposing the attack.  Another divisive event was the 1996-1997 Shiprider Agreement. Caribbean countries split over allowing Washington to have the ability to sail into their territorial waters freely, with the US coastguard allowed to interdict vessels. Another split occurred when cruise company lobbyists defeated an effort to create a common head-tax in the region, successfully playing the islands off of one another.

On the other hand, the region has over time come together to oppose the US blockade on Cuba. Havana provides a large number of scholarships for students as well as technical and agriculture assistance. For decades it has built up a lot of goodwill in the region.

Among the general population in the Caribbean there is also a great deal of historical memory around the role of foreign intervention, with the demand for colonial reparations being widely popular.

In another example of unity, following the 2004 coup d’état in Haiti, CARICOM denounced the US removal of the country’s elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide. However, after the US and France advised CARICOM against raising the issue at the UN Security Council, Caribbean officials withdrew in silence. Aristide was allowed to enter Jamaica briefly, but after US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and other US official objected, he soon returned to his exile in Africa.

Importantly, the leaders of Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and other states in the region did not attend Trump and Pompeo’s recent meetings.

The officials of CARICOM member states sometimes act according to how they perceive themselves to be affected by high-handed US geopolitical policies. They don’t like to be pushed around as ‘small island development states’, and are broadly skeptical of military intervention but are not necessarily unified on this point.

What’s happening now though is that US policymakers in a more concerted manner are seeking to widen the gulf between Caribbean states. Some Caribbean officials have more capacity for resilience, while others see only benefits in closer ties with Washington, which can undoubtedly help them with corporate investors. Many interests and pressures exist for siding with the deadly US policy in Venezuela.

CARICOM Confronts the Big House: Trump Attempts to Split the #Caribbean over Venezuela. https://t.co/UWl1NfMQ1Z via @wordpressdotcom

          — Siusaidh Chaimbeul (@Zaganashikwe) March 26, 2019

Attending the Mar-a-lago meeting with Pompeo were the heads of government of the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Saint Lucia, and the heads of state of the Dominican Republic and Haiti, all having cut ties with Venezuela’s elected Bolivarian government and recognizing Juan Guaidó.  The same countries attended the Kingston meeting, with the addition of Belize and Saint Kitts and Nevis. It should be noted that aside from Trinidad/Tobago and Guyana, the official ‘head of state’ of most former British Caribbean colonies remains Queen Elizabeth II.

Structural crises at home

Governments joining Trump’s Caribbean strategy face deep problems at home.

Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse governs without parliament after failing to hold elections, and is suffering a crisis of legitimacy that threatens to topple him from office. US support is a lynchpin for his political survival.

Dominican president Danilo Medina is facing the largest protests in memory in the country, as he is accused of massive corruption and attempting to steal the February municipal elections. The Punta Catalina power plant Odebrecht scandal alone may total upwards of $1bn, a huge scandal for Medina’s government.

“We Want Democracy!” Mass Protests Continue in Dominican Republic After Local Elections Suspended https://t.co/DZm8elSO7i pic.twitter.com/f3id2Ec8wX

            — Democracy Now! (@democracynow) February 28, 2020

Jamaica’s government, continuing to suffer under large-scale structural adjustment debt, has been promised various deals from US officials. This helped compel the country’s withdrawal from Venezuela’s PetroCaribe program. Venezuela itself faced mounting barriers to maintaining it.

The Bahamas, meanwhile, has long been a virtual US colony, with the island used as a tax haven platform for transnational capital. The archipelago is battered under the climate change crisis in the form of the recent devastating hurricane Dorian.

As for Belize, another country highly susceptible to pressure from powerful western states, it was recently reported that one-sixth of the country’s total landmass was being used by the British military for jungle warfare training. Belize has also faced annexation threats from Guatemala in the past.

US ‘national security’ strategy and the imperial frontier

Sanctioning and attacking Venezuela through hybrid warfare, some US policymakers and DC think tanks now openly plan for a violent escalation targeting the country. With a far-right government in Brazil and built-up US military bases and proxies in Colombia, Washington has helped inflame a hostile situation on the country’s borders.

This has extended to the US tightening the screws on Cuba and Nicaragua, to the recent ousting of Bolivia’s elected government, and even a short lived attempt by the highly interventionist OAS secretary general Luis Almagro to undermine CARICOM and ALBA-member state Dominica.

Now: The OAS/Washington has partnered with Dominica's opposition to intervene in the country and stop the elections which the UWP cannot win: Prime Minister @SkerritR. (actual soundbite to come) @teleSURenglish pic.twitter.com/MQEhC6VDSj

            — Camila (@camilateleSUR) December 3, 2019

By late 2017, seeking to halt any kind of compromise with Cuba, Trump’s administration began to claim that Cuba had targeted US embassy staff in Havana with a ‘sonic weapons attack’. Recordings of the ‘sonic attack’, as CNN later reported, were thought to be the mating calls of a loud cricket species.

The US Helms-Burton Act that targets Cuba is being strengthened. Third parties doing business on the island may face more lawsuits that increase risks for investors. Meanwhile, under Trump cruise ship lines and many charter and direct flights became blocked from traveling to Cuba, while inward remittance flows to the island have been made much more difficult. The Trump administration is also carrying out new plans to attack the island’s medical services, one of the most vibrant parts of its economy.

US Blockade Prevents Public Health Supplies From Reaching Cuba https://t.co/w1B3lGG2AI pic.twitter.com/xt5saIkaJQ

          — Orinoco Tribune (@OrinocoTribune) February 18, 2020

Whatever one’s view on Nicaragua’s 2018 violence carried out by some police and government and opposition supporters, US & EU sanctions are not the answer. They’re having a growing impact on the small Central American country beyond individuals: increasing risk calculations for businesses investing in the country, slowing and hurting the likelihood for loans to be refinanced, and over time it will make it harder for the country’s diaspora to wire money to family members. Meanwhile, the US congress has expanded funding to influence Nicaraguan civil society.

The end goal of the NICA Act and of EU sanctions is not to promote peace, but rather to push for a draconian neoliberal solution. This is highlighted by OAS secretary general Luis Almagro’s recent call for Nicaragua to be ‘strangled’ through sanctions and other means.

All evidence of the illegality of waging economic warfare in peacetime.

Pressure on Trinidad and Suriname, deepening ties with Guyana and the Netherland Antilles

Guyana, a country where roughly two-thirds of the citizens live in poverty, has etched a new deal with Exxon that is expected to transform the country into a major oil producer within the global energy sector.

US military activities meanwhile have increased inside Guyana; however, such ‘lily pad’ or training exercises occur in many parts of the region. This reflects just how deeply integrated the region is into the US orbit.

In recent weeks tensions inside Guyana appear to have boiled to the surface as the two main parties in its bourgeois democracy compete for leverage. Socially-constructed racialized and ethnic differences have historically been amplified, weaponized, and exploited to control political outcomes in the country.

Here it’s important to note the historical formation of Guyana, and the US role in pressuring Winston Churchill to militarily intervene in British Guiana in 1953, overthrowing its first elected prime minister Cheddi Jagan.

"The discovery of oil off #Guyana could significantly reshape the country’s economy and society. But as the lead-up to today's general election has shown, oil’s effects on politics could be just as important" writes @HollyERyan (@QMPoliticsIR @QMUL_HSS): https://t.co/yNmoMhGEco

             — LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre (@LSE_LACC) March 2, 2020

New oil discoveries in Surinam may also dramatically alter its political economy in due course. Its authorities have come under pressure to end friendly ties with Venezuela. However, in recent weeks the regional leftwing outlet teleSUR has expanded its broadcasts in Suriname, a member of ALBA.

Trinidad and Tobago, which sought to honor a new liquified natural gas pipeline deal it made with Caracas, was pressured in February to end the project. Media reports indicate it was halted by Washington’s sanctions and US based transnationals active in Trinidad’s energy sector.

A cat and mouse game has meanwhile played out with Venezuela’s PDVSA and it’s contracted third party oil vessels facing seizure and new pressures through the US sanction regime. This has caused a mad-scramble, with diplomatic crises occurring between Venezuela and the Netherlands Antilles ABC islands which host a growing array of US southward aimed operations.

Geopolitics in the globalizing Caribbean

Peace was never a defining feature of US ‘national security’ strategy. The US pursuit of global supremacy includes misrepresenting the world as naturally chaotic and dependent on American leadership.

Ultimately, the US hegemonic strategy includes sowing discord, ramping up regime change, and keeping the world unstable. In bringing about political transitions, US policymakers and their allies use the most sophisticated forms of soft power and, at times, backed up by force, as exemplified by the coups in Haiti, Honduras, and, most recently, Bolivia.

Challenging this juggernaut requires local, regional, and global efforts and new transnational forms of popular organizing, alongside fundamental changes inside the US where peace, cooperation, and respect for international law need to be advocated for, not shunned.

- Dr. Jeb Sprague is a Research Associate at the University of California, Riverside. He formerly taught at the University of Virginia and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a founding member of the Network for Critical Studies of Global Capitalism (NCSGC) and has taught sociology in the Caribbean, East Asia, and North America.