The Caribbean has become the stage for a high-stakes security experiment. Washington has deployed warships, submarines, and reconnaissance aircraft to the southern waters under the banner of a new anti-narcotics offensive. It is a move that reshapes the balance of power in the region — and exposes the deep fractures within CARICOM.
Trinidad and Tobago has chosen its side. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has abandoned the usual choreography of Caribbean diplomacy, rejecting collective consultation and embracing a “Trinidad and Tobago First” strategy. Her calculation is blunt: decades of spiraling gun violence and the social strain of illegal migration demand hard power, not regional roundtables.
This decision has cracked open CARICOM’s fragile veneer of unity. Several member states, aligned through ALBA, have already pledged loyalty to Venezuela and condemned Washington’s maneuvers. Others remain silent, unwilling to be drawn into open confrontation but wary of U.S. naval escalation. What Persad-Bissessar has done is expose the inconvenient truth — that CARICOM has no single voice on security, only overlapping loyalties and divergent threats.
The Prime Minister’s gamble is risky. Aligning with the U.S. offers access to unmatched military capability, but it also ties Port of Spain to an agenda that stretches beyond drugs and guns. For critics, this is an abdication of regional solidarity. For Persad-Bissessar, it is survival politics: the state has been “drowning in blood” for two decades, and waiting on consensus has delivered nothing.
The question now is not whether CARICOM approves — its silence is telling — but whether other states, faced with the same pressures of transnational crime and internal violence, will quietly drift toward Port of Spain’s position. In the Caribbean’s new security order, national interest may finally eclipse regional identity.
