How Legitimate Concerns Become Permission Structures for Extreme Action
By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus
There is a rhetorical technique as old as power itself. You begin with something no reasonable person can deny, then use that reasonableness as a bridge to something no reasonable person should accept. The current moment in global politics, and in the domestic and foreign policy of the United States in particular, is saturated with this manoeuvre. It deserves a name, let us call it the seasoning of reasonableness. A sprinkling of legitimate concern designed not to solve a problem but to make the disproportionate, the coercive, and the authoritarian palatable.
The pattern is remarkably consistent where a genuine issue is identified, one that resonates with ordinary people because it touches their real anxieties. The range of issues is broad, border security, drug trafficking, the cost of higher education, the risks of artificial intelligence, trade imbalances, democracy in Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, the rights of Cuban doctors working overseas and so on. These are not invented problems, they exist, they matter, and they deserve serious policy attention but in the hands of the current American administration, the legitimate concern is never the destination, it is the on ramp.
The Architecture of the Manoeuvre
The technique follows a three-beat rhythm. First, articulate a concern that most people share. Second, escalate the response far beyond what the concern warrants. Third, when challenged on the escalation, retreat to the original concern and accuse critics of dismissing it. The reasonable premise becomes both the launching pad and the shield.
Consider the case of border security. Sovereign nations have every right, indeed, a responsibility, to manage their borders, to know who is entering, and to enforce immigration law with consistency and fairness. That is the reasonable kernel, however, the response has been militarized ICE raids in churches and courthouses, the deportation of legal residents and veterans, the separation of families as deliberate policy, and the erosion of due process protections that took decades to build. When civil liberties organizations object, the response is swift and predictable, “So you’re for open borders?” The seasoning of reasonableness does its work; the critic is forced to relitigate the premise rather than challenge the excess.
Or consider trade! No serious economist would argue that trade relationships should never be revisited, that supply chain vulnerabilities do not matter, or that trade deficits are irrelevant to domestic industry. These are legitimate subjects of policy debate, but random unilateral tariffs, tariffs of 145 percent on Chinese goods are not trade policy, they are economic bludgeoning, designed not to rebalance trade but to assert dominance, punish, and restructure global commerce by fiat. The reasonable concern about manufacturing resilience is the seasoning, the unreasonable reality is a tariff regime that functions as a tax on American consumers while destabilizing the very trading system that underwrites global prosperity.
The pattern recurs with almost algorithmic precision. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes deserve thoughtful evaluation, but the administration’s response has been to gut civil rights infrastructure, freeze federal hiring, and mandate the removal of DEI language from government agencies as though the words themselves were contagions. Concerns about government spending are legitimate, but they do not justify an unelected technology entrepreneur being granted authority to dismantle agencies, fire career civil servants by the thousand, and restructure the machinery of government with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. The reasonable concern is the ticket but the destination was always somewhere else.
The Caribbean Feels the Pattern
For those of us in the Caribbean, this technique is not merely an American domestic curiosity as it arrives on our shores with material consequences. Drug trafficking and organized crime are genuine scourges in our region. They corrode institutions, claim lives, and undermine the governance capacity of states that are already stretched thin. No Caribbean leader, no Caribbean citizen, disputes this, but when the United States invokes drug trafficking as the justification for behaviour that looks less like partnership and more like coercion, the seasoning of reasonableness is doing its work. The crime is real, the question is whether the response serves the stated purpose or some other, less acknowledged one.
We have watched as the administration has used the language of security to exert pressure on Caribbean governments, pressure that extends well beyond any plausible counter-narcotics objective. The recent deportation flights, the characterization of entire populations as vectors of criminality, the implicit and sometimes explicit threats to sovereignty, these are not the actions of a partner combating a shared threat. They are the actions of a power using a legitimate concern as cover for something else, the reassertion of a hemispheric dominance that treats small states as instruments of American domestic politics.
The trap is exquisitely constructed. Caribbean leaders who push back against overreach risk being painted as soft on crime, as enablers of the very trafficking networks that torment their own people. The reasonable premise, drugs are a problem, becomes the cage. One cannot challenge the disproportionate response without appearing to deny the underlying reality. I am sure you can see the pattern in Cuba, Venezuela and in the new visa applications requirements.
An Old Playbook
Those of us from formerly colonized societies recognize this technique in our bones. The civilizing mission was the original seasoning of reasonableness. Colonial powers did not announce that they were extracting wealth and subjugating peoples, they announced that they were bringing order, education, Christianity, and the rule of law to societies that lacked these things. The premise contained just enough truth, there were societies without formal legal systems as Europeans understood them, to make the entire enterprise appear not merely defensible but noble. The unreasonable superstructure of exploitation was built on a foundation of selectively reasonable observation.
The structural logic has not changed. What has changed is the vocabulary, “Civilization” has become “security,” “Order” has become “compliance,” “The white man’s burden” has become “the rules-based international order,” invoked selectively, applied asymmetrically, and abandoned the moment it constrains the powerful. The seasoning changes with the era but the dish remains the same.
The Deeper Problem
The most corrosive effect of this technique is not the immediate harm of any single policy, though that harm is real and often devastating. The deeper damage is epistemological, when reasonable concerns are systematically instrumentalized, reasonableness itself becomes suspect. Citizens learn to distrust legitimate policy arguments because they have seen too many of them function as Trojan horses. The boy cries wolf, and eventually the village stops listening even when there are actual wolves.
This is profoundly dangerous for democratic governance. Democracy depends on the possibility of good-faith disagreement, on the assumption that when someone raises a concern, they are actually concerned about the thing they claim to be concerned about. When that assumption collapses, politics ceases to be a contest of ideas and becomes purely a contest of power. We are further along that road than many wish to acknowledge.
For small states, for the Caribbean, for Small Island Developing States, for all those nations that navigate global politics with limited leverage, the stakes are particularly acute. We cannot match power with power. Our instrument has always been argument, the moral force of principled positions, the insistence that rules apply equally, the appeal to shared norms. When the seasoning of reasonableness poisons the well of genuine argument, it is our instrument that is most damaged.
What Is to Be Done
Naming the technique is itself a form of resistance. When we can see the pattern, the reasonable premise, the disproportionate response, the retreat to the premise when challenged, we are better equipped to engage with it. We can say, Yes, border security matters, and no, that does not justify what you are doing. Yes, drug trafficking is a plague, and no, that does not give you the right to treat sovereign nations as subordinates. Yes, there are legitimate concerns about human rights in Cuba and the success of the economic model, and no, it is wrong to starve a population to force regime change.
The task is to refuse the false binary. The technique works precisely because it presents only two positions, accept the entire package, reasonable premise and unreasonable action together, or be cast as someone who denies the problem exists. The intellectually honest position, the position that serves both truth and justice, is the one that holds both ideas simultaneously, the problem is real and what you are doing about it is wrong.
That is not a comfortable position, it satisfies neither the wielders of power nor their most absolute opponents but it is the position of reason, actual reason, not the decorative, instrumental kind. In a political moment defined by the abuse of reasonableness, the most radical act may be to insist on the genuine article.
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