October 9, 2026
For more than five decades, Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states have sought to turn their vulnerability as small states into collective strength. That effort is now under strain—perhaps like never before. The second Trump administration is prompting the bloc’s 14 sovereign member states to take fundamentally different approaches to exercising their agency—and convert it into influence and leverage—in an increasingly contested world order.
Founded in 1973, CARICOM brings together 15 Caribbean nations to advance regional integration, coordinate foreign policy, and pool their collective strength in addressing economic, social, and security challenges. With the exception of Haiti, whose independence dates to 1804, its mainly Anglophone members gained political independence between the 1960s and 1980s.
Against that historical backdrop, CARICOM’s founding treaty enshrines the coordination of member states’ foreign policies as a core pillar. Yet the Community’s widening foreign policy divide is making it more difficult for it to maintain its collective diplomatic agency. This divide centers on a fundamental question: How should small states navigate a power disparity they cannot eliminate while creating greater room for strategic choice?
Navigating Great-Power Asymmetry
For some governments, agency comes from cultivating close relationships with the United States and converting dependence into strategic leverage. For others, it comes from preserving alternatives—hedging, diversifying partnerships, and avoiding excessive dependence on any one power. Still others see agency as something small states can create collectively by strengthening the institutions and rules that constrain unbridled great-power behavior.
But the underlying problem extends beyond the Trump administration’s transactional, zero-sum approach to international relations: great-power competition is escalating, spheres of influence are again gaining salience, and the multilateral system that has traditionally given small states some protection is under greater pressure.
These pressures do not on their own create divisions within CARICOM, but they make those divisions more consequential. CARICOM governments have never had identical interests or foreign policy preferences. What has changed is the environment in which those differences are playing out. As Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness observed at CARICOM’s February summit, “The speed of global change is outpacing the speed of regional coordination.”
These pressures also make the question of strategic autonomy more urgent. For Caribbean governments, strategic autonomy has never meant isolation from Washington—or opposition to it. It has meant preserving the ability to make independent choices despite profound disparities in power.
That is why the region’s traditional diplomatic playbook has emphasized sovereign equality, noninterference, international law, nonalignment, and multilateralism. These principles give small states something they lack materially: mechanisms for resisting the idea that great powers should have greater rights to determine the choices of weaker states.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine tested that approach. The bloc condemned the invasion as contrary to sovereignty, territorial integrity, noninterference, the prohibition on force, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. The question for CARICOM is whether it applies those same principles consistently when pressure comes from Washington—or from any other great power.
That question goes to the heart of CARICOM’s current divide. The region is not merely divided over what the United States is doing vis-à-vis the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Its governments are increasingly divided over where their own leverage comes from. Those differences reflect competing strategies for converting agency into leverage.
Three Strategies for Exercising Agency
Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have moved furthest toward accommodation with Washington. Both have strong reasons to do so. Guyana’s geopolitical and economic circumstances—including its territorial dispute with Venezuela, its growing importance as an oil producer, and the presence of major American energy companies—make the United States an important strategic partner. Trinidad and Tobago faces acute security pressures, including transnational crime and developments in neighboring Venezuela. Both countries’ participation in the US-led Shield of the Americas illustrates the practical value these governments attach to closer cooperation.
This strategy has obvious advantages. Small states need security assistance, investment, markets, and diplomatic support. They cannot always prioritize principles over immediate strategic needs. But dependence creates its own vulnerabilities. The more a government relies on a major power, the greater the potential cost of disagreeing with it. Accommodation can therefore create agency in the short term while narrowing strategic choices over time.
Other CARICOM governments have taken a different approach to the same asymmetry. Barbados, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Antigua and Barbuda have emphasized international law, multilateral institutions, and collective diplomacy. Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s advocacy of reforming global financial institutions illustrates a broader proposition: small states can increase their leverage by changing the institutions through which international power is exercised rather than simply negotiating individually with the powerful.
This is not a rejection of power politics. It is another way of practicing it. Institutional or “soft” balancing uses rules, coalitions, and diplomatic coordination to limit the impact of extreme power disparities.
Other governments have pursued a more fluid mix of approaches. Like Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, Jamaica, and Belize joined the US-led Shield of the Americas, signaling a willingness to deepen security cooperation with Washington, particularly against transnational crime. Yet unlike Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, they did not sign the Shield’s September joint statement. Their strategy suggests an effort to capture the practical benefits of closer US ties without embracing the political dimensions of Washington’s hemispheric agenda.
Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Suriname have pursued their own forms of hedging, combining practical engagement with efforts to preserve strategic options. Haiti is its own case, with its relationship with Washington shaped by severe constraints on strategic choice.
Rather than a binary pro- or anti-American divide, these competing responses amount to three broad strategies: accommodation, institutional balancing, and hedging.
Can CARICOM Still Act Together?
These different strategies are not inherently problematic for CARICOM. The danger is that CARICOM may no longer have a common framework for managing them. Foreign policy diversity is inevitable among sovereign states, even when they belong to the same bloc. Diplomatic fragmentation, however, is another matter: it occurs when a growing CARICOM cleavage over how to manage US power undermines the bloc’s ability to act collectively. That is CARICOM’s central challenge.
The region does not need a common position on every US policy. It needs common principles governing how its members deal with major powers. Its member states must decide, anew, what strategic autonomy should mean for CARICOM’s relations with great powers.
If autonomy means keeping Washington at arm’s length, few Caribbean governments can afford it. If it means refusing to cooperate with the United States, it is equally unrealistic. A more practical objective is to pursue autonomy by preserving the ability to cooperate, disagree, hedge, and change course without surrendering national or regional decision-making power.
The countries of the Caribbean cannot change their geography or make Washington less powerful. Nor can they eliminate the enormous asymmetry between themselves and the United States. What they can decide is how much that asymmetry determines their choices. The three strategies—accommodation, institutional balancing, and hedging—may all be necessary. What CARICOM cannot afford is to let divergent strategies destroy its members’ one source of common leverage: acting together.
Nand C. Bardouille is the outgoing manager of the Diplomatic Academy of the Caribbean in the Institute of International Relations at The University of the West Indies St. Augustine Campus, Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. The views expressed here are his own.
Source: IPI Global Observatory
