By Professor C. Justin Robinson
Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal, The UWI Five Islands Campus
On the evening of Tuesday, December 16th , citizens of Antigua & Barbuda and Dominica received unwelcome news.
The Trump administration had announced an expanded travel ban, and among the countries added were Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica.
For most of us, this is not an abstraction, this is the aunt in Brooklyn we visit every summer, the cousin’s wedding in Miami next spring, the graduate programme, the job interview, the family reunions that stitch Caribbean life to American life.
For thirty years, that connection required no particular political consciousness to maintain. You got your visa, you boarded your flight, you moved between worlds.
The US was not a foreign policy challenge, it was simply where family lived, where the culture that shaped your music and dreams originated.
And now, suddenly, it is complicated and many Caribbean people have no framework for understanding why.
I have been thinking about this since a conversation with one of my graduate students several weeks ago.
We had been discussing the American military buildup in the Caribbean, the USS Gerald R. Ford stationed off Venezuela’s coast, over fifteen thousand US personnel deployed, more than eighty people killed in strikes on boats the Americans claim carried drugs.
She asked what seemed to be a most naïve question, “But what has Venezuela done to the United States?” Her confusion is itself the story of a generation raised in peace and deeply embedded in American culture.
For those of us who came of age during the Cold War, military buildups required no explanation rooted in bilateral grievance. Great powers project force because geography is destiny and spheres of influence must be maintained.
Grenada “did” nothing to the United States in 1983. Yet American paratroopers still landed at Point Salines. But my student, like most of her generation across CARICOM, has no living memory of that world.
She was born into a Caribbean that had become, almost without anyone noticing, a Zone of Peace, not as diplomatic aspiration but as lived reality. For thirty years, the great powers largely left us alone.
The United States remained the fabric of Caribbean life due to family, remittances and culture, but not as a military presence. The limited Russian presence retreated and China arrived with infrastructure loans, not warships.
This generation lacks a framework their grandparents possessed for understanding why superpowers behave as they do.
There is something else that Washington and other great powers consistently fail to grasp, the Caribbean’s instinctive, bone-deep anti-militarism. This is not ideological pacifism; it is simply that war is not part of our lived reality.
CARICOM nations do not have viable armies, our Defence Forces are tiny, Antigua’s could fit in a small auditorium.
For Caribbean people, war is something that happens far away, in failed states, where politics has catastrophically broken down.
It is not something we do and the very idea of military conflict as a tool of policy feels alien. When American officials speak of “military options” and “all tools on the table,” when aircraft carriers appear on our horizon, they may not realize how foreign this sounds to Caribbean ears. We are non-military because that is who we are as surely as cricket and carnival.
This context is essential for understanding the impossible choices now facing Caribbean leaders, choices that may look like indecision, weakness or even stubbornness to outside observers but are in fact the careful calculations that small-state survival demands.
Consider the dilemmas, When Trinidad’s Prime Minister offered American forces access to her territory, Venezuela’s President Maduro declared it tantamount to an act of war.
When Antigua declined a US request to host a military radar installation, we now find ourselves on a travel ban list, while Grenada still considering a similar request, does not.
Cooperate with the Americans and face Venezuelan threats, decline and risk American displeasure. Accept Chinese infrastructure investment and attract Washington’s suspicion, reject it and lose development funding your people desperately need.
There is no “right answer” here and there is no simple path that avoids all costs. Every choice carries consequences, and the consequences fall not on distant diplomats but on ordinary citizens, on visa applications, on trade relationships, on the cost of goods, on opportunities opened or foreclosed.
This is why Caribbean citizens must understand what their leaders are actually navigating.
It is easy to demand clarity, pick a side, state your position, stand firm, but small states do not have the luxury of grand gestures.
Our leverage is limited, our economies are vulnerable, our populations can fit inside a single American city.
What looks like ambiguity is often wisdom, what looks like hesitation is often the careful maintenance of relationships that cannot be easily rebuilt once broken.
And the crisis is real.
The United States has assembled its largest military deployment in the Western Hemisphere since the Cuban Missile Crisis. A blockade of Venezuelan oil exports has been ordered.
Venezuela has turned to China, Russia, and Iran for support. The Caribbean finds itself where it has always preferred not to be, between great powers in collision.
CARICOM’s response has been one of improvisation, not coordination, each nation calculating its interests in real-time.
The region needs to refocus and rapidly pivot to the reality of a global shift that demands nimble, sophisticated diplomacy of a kind we have not needed for a generation.
My generation understood this. We watched careers disrupted and families divided by Cold War politics. We knew that maintaining relationships with powerful nations requires constant attention, diplomatic skill, and sometimes difficult trade-offs.
These were not reasons for resentment but simply realities of a world where power is distributed unequally and geography matters.
The Caribbean’s Zone of Peace was never guaranteed. It was a gift of historical circumstance, a generation-long pause.
That pause is ending and what replaces it will be determined by skill, the political and diplomatic skill that small states must deploy to survive between giants.
I call these skills Caribbean dance moves, the ability to maintain balance while the floor shifts, to move gracefully between partners without losing your footing, to keep relationships intact when the music changes tempo.
These are not skills of resistance or antagonism; they are skills of survival and dignity.
They require understanding the tensions between maintaining deep bonds with the United States, bonds driven by geography, bonds of family, culture, and shared values, while also maintaining the sovereign right to chart our own course. Powerful nations will act in their interests.
Our task is not to resent this but to navigate it wisely, preserving what matters most, our relationships, our economies, and our room to manoeuvre.
A generation raised in peace, embedded in American life and instinctively suspicious of military logic learn very quickly the grammar of a world they did not choose but must now navigate.
The music has started again! My student asked a simple question. The answer, it turns out, is anything but simple. And that is the lesson her generation, all of us must now absorb.
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Good perspective as usual Professor. You know the singling out of Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica though intentional was done only to send a message to the wider OECS and Caribbean. Once we have the Citizenship by Investment Program and the Cuban Medical Brigade, we would always be in contention, controversy and argument with the US as they want us to abandon both schemes completely. The warning shot that was sent to Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica is their admonition to the entire region to fall in line or else. . In addition to that, Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica’s Prime Minister were about the two most vocal, operatic and outspoken voices in relation to the ongoing military issues against Venezuela. If this was not a “hush” or else, I don’t know what is.