OPINION:
The 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community last week focused on unity, finance, security and crime, but the subject hanging over every session went largely unnamed: Washington.
In 18 months, the Trump administration has reasserted American dominance in this hemisphere more forcefully than any other government since President Ronald Reagan.
Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro was removed from Caracas in January. The U.S. Navy has assembled its largest Caribbean presence since the Cuban missile crisis.
In March, Caribbean governments were among the signatories of the Shield of the Americas framework at Doral, and the president told Congress that American supremacy in the Western Hemisphere will never again be questioned. He is right.
Yet primacy secured by the Navy must be consolidated by capital, or it will not last decades into the future. The Caribbean is no longer simply America’s neighborhood. It is becoming one of America’s greatest strategic assets.
That is the unfinished business of the Monroe Doctrine, and the Caribbean is where it gets finished or fumbled. President James Monroe’s warning in 1823 was never merely about keeping foreign fleets out of our waters; it was about who builds the hemisphere.
On that question, the past two-plus decades were underwhelming, if not embarrassing.
While American strategy fixed its gaze on the Indo-Pacific, Beijing quietly financed ports, telecommunications networks and public works across a region that sits astride the Panama Canal, the Gulf of America and the Atlantic shipping lanes.
China did not need a carrier group to gain a foothold 90 miles off the coast of Florida. It needed a checkbook and our inattention.
The administration understands this. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s March visits to Jamaica, Guyana and Suriname tied American support to open markets and a decisive turn away from Beijing. That is the right demand, but it works only if American companies show up to compete for what opens.
The shield is in place. Now comes the harder work of making the Caribbean an American economic success story.
The raw material is already there. Guyana’s offshore fields have made a country of 800,000 people one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, and the boom is driving demand for housing, power generation and more. Trinidad and Tobago remains a serious producer of natural gas and petrochemicals, and Suriname’s offshore blocks could follow Guyana’s path.
The Dominican Republic has built a diversified economy of manufacturing, logistics and free trade zones. Jamaica is expanding Kingston’s transshipment port. Barbados, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and The Bahamas run financial centers that move capital throughout the hemisphere.
None of this is charity work. A port expansion in Kingston is a contract for American engineering firms and equipment makers before it is anything else. New hospitals buy American medical technology. New data centers run on American software and American cloud infrastructure.
As the region grows, U.S. exporters gain customers a two-hour flight from Miami rather than a two-week sail from Shenzhen.
The pandemic taught American boardrooms what we should have already known about supply chains stretched across the Pacific. Nearshoring has become the defining investment trend of this decade, and the Caribbean Basin offers what companies now prize: proximity, legal systems we understand and our own time zones.
Pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, logistics, financial technology and software work can all operate there at scale, serving the North American market.
America enters this contest with advantages no rival can match. Geography is first, then come the commercial and family ties that bind Kingston to Brooklyn and Santo Domingo to Miami, the universities to which Caribbean leaders send their children, the hospitals to which their citizens fly and capital markets with no equal anywhere.
Beijing can pour concrete. It cannot offer any of the rest. What Washington should not do is confuse this opportunity with an aid program. The old model of dependency bred resentment abroad and skepticism at home, and deserved both.
The administration’s instinct that hemispheric policy should serve American workers and American firms is correct. The Caribbean is where that instinct pays off fastest: infrastructure financing that generates American export orders, energy development that anchors regional security on American terms and educational and medical partnerships that bind the next generation of Caribbean leaders to the U.S. rather than to Chinese scholarship programs.
The leaders who gathered in St. Lucia last week for the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community are watching to see whether the American posture in their region is a passing enforcement action or a lasting commitment. Some of them hedged toward Beijing during the years we looked the other way.
Give them a better offer, and most will take it. The ties run deeper, and the market is bigger.
Two centuries ago, Monroe warned Europe’s powers to stay out of this hemisphere. He never imagined a rival financing the harbor cranes.
The doctrine’s next chapter will not be written by a destroyer squadron; it will be written in port concessions, power contracts and classrooms. President Trump has settled the question of who has authority over these waters. Now it is time to build the shores and beyond.
• Michael L. Barrett is the vice chairman of Hamilton Reserve Bank, founder and CEO of Global Premier Health and senior executive leader in residence with KPMG Advisory Services.
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