EDITORIAL: Biden era and C’bean relations

WITH a new United States Government having assumed office less than a week ago, Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean will be eager to see what will come their way in terms of policy making by the Government.

For having gone through a tough global recession and still experiencing some of the fall-outs from it, this region will want to feel that it has a place in the foreign policy of the Joe Biden administration.

Issues like climate change, COVID-19, trade, and economic revival and immigration are some of the areas this region wants to tackle going forward. The United States has always considered the Caribbean as part of its backyard and has devised policies to keep foreign influences from the region and from the wider Latin American space.

One of the key policy developed for a stable US-Caribbean relationship is the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) which was created at a time of grave political and economic unrest seeping the region.

There was at the time a raging civil war in El Salvador; Nicaraguans had changed their government by ousting their head of state (Anastasio Somozoa); there was a coup in Grenada when the then Eric Gairy government was overthrown; and some states in Latin America and the Caribbean were forging close ties with Cuba which the Americans  had always detested.

These events were interpreted in Washington D.C. as a likely breeding ground for radical administrations to seize power and later create relations with Cuba and ultimately the then Soviet Union.

Such was the thinking in the North which did not want to have to deal with another Socialist government in the Americas.

Therefore to keep the Caribbean from harbouring these developments, the Americans came up with the CBI. That policy offered access to the USA market for a range of Caribbean made goods, financial assistance to the smaller islands, and paved the way for investments.

That was years ago and since the Soviet Union no longer exists, there were other foreign policy matters. Following on from that was the North American Free Trade Arrangement (NAFTA) which was to be America’s response to the single market which the Europeans had fashioned.

Unfortunately, NAFTA did not emerge as a arrangement to benefit all countries in the region, as it was restricted to the USA, Canada and Mexico.

Drug trafficking is one of the new issues, with American interest being to limit the flow of narcotics from Latin America reaching the USA.

Economics is another and with the drying up of American financial aid to this region, countries want either a resumption of it or a broadening of the CBI to ensure the survival of their economies.

More importantly Barbados does not want its international business sector hampered in any way.

It is expected that the Joe Biden administration will open dialogue with CARICOM as they chart a new course.

More recently COVID 19 has surfaced and with vaccines now considered a key remedy to combat the virus. It is imagined that this will be at the centre of talks between the new USA administration and the Caribbean.

It is not expected the Caribbean will be ignored, and we anticipate better relations between the two regions.