As governments around the world try to adapt to the international order that has seen so much change over the past year, CARICOM governments would do well to read this excellent piece by Prof. C. Justin Robinson, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal at The UWI Five Islands Campus. It is available on his LinkedIn page which you can find below.
By Prof C. Justin Robinson, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Campus Principal at The
University of the West Indies Five Islands CampusThe last twelve months have been an education. Not in what we hoped, but in what we should have known. We watched the Trump administration assert “America First” with a bluntness that left no room for ambiguity. We watched Canada and Europe accommodate, recalibrate, defer until Greenland was threatened, until a NATO ally was in the crosshairs. Then, suddenly, sovereignty mattered, strategic autonomy became urgent. Decades of comfortable assumptions dissolved in weeks and I have had to revisit my world view. The lesson for the Caribbean could not be clearer, no one is coming to save us. Not Washington, which sees us as backyard or afterthought. Not London, which long ago moved on. Not Ottawa, which has its own recalibrations underway. Not Brussels, which discovered its own vulnerability and has no bandwidth for ours. The rules-based international order we were told to trust has revealed itself as a convenience for the powerful, suspended the moment it becomes inconvenient. We are on our own. The question is whether we will finally act like it…
Read the rest of this brief essay here.