Editorial | CARICOM and Ben Franklin

While Donald Trump has predictably begun his second stint as America’s president with actions that pose existential threats to the Caribbean, The Gleaner remains nonplussed by the seeming absence of a coordinated effort by regional governments to survive the assault.

Or, if they have, they are being secretive about it.

There has, for example, been no public signal from the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – an economic and functional cooperation organisation of 15 mostly small island and developing states – that they have been, or expect to be, working towards a common strategy, as this newspaper suggested that they should shortly after Mr Trump won the presidential election in November.

Having apparently missed that boat, CARICOM, and whoever in the region is willing to join it, must rally urgently, heeding a remark credited to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the US Declaration of Independence in 1776.

“We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately,” Franklin reportedly said.

Mr Trump’s inauguration was on Monday, January 20. Among his first acts as president was to sign an executive order to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement, to which his predecessor, Joe Biden, had returned America, following Mr Trump’s similar action during his first presidency.

The Paris accords of 2015 were aimed at keeping the rise in Earth’s temperature to below 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to the 1850s, at the start of the new Industrial Age. This was to avoid the most catastrophic effects of global warming and climate change.

But scientists have reported that the threshold was passed for the first time in 2024, which was the hottest year since records have been kept. The Earth was 1.6 degrees hotter than the pre-industrial period.

REGIONAL INITIATIVE

The credible science is that global warming is largely the effect of human actions, especially the greenhouse gas released from the burning of fossil fuels and methane expelled by animals raised for food.

The Caribbean is responsible for less than two per cent of the world’s greenhouse gases, but it is among the regions most at risk from the effects of climate change: rising sea levels; more frequent and ferocious storms; unpredictable and worse floods; and longer, more intense droughts.

As mostly small islands, with populations concentrated in coastal areas and their critical tourism industries built around sea and sand, Caribbean countries, as are most developing regions, are in a struggle to find the financing to respond to current climate-related catastrophes and harden their infrastructure against future threats.

Yet, Mr Trump has pledged to undo his predecessor’s other climate initiatives. He will remove restraints on the production and use of fossil fuels, as well as rescind regulations that accelerate a pivot to alternative energy, including electric vehicles.

Mr Trump, at the same time, has shown no inclination towards supporting climate financing for developing countries, which will be stressed further when America formally leaves the Paris Agreement.

When, after last November’s COP climate conference, Mia Mottley – the prime minister of Barbados and CARICOM’s current chairman – declared her willingness to meet Mr Trump at any time to discuss the climate question, this newspaper urged her to follow through, but to make it a regional initiative.

It is not clear what, if anything, has happened to that initiative, which would be of value to the region.

TRUMP’S MERCURIAL NATURE

Even before he was sworn in, Mr Trump’s team was reportedly shopping around the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Americas, for places willing to accommodate people deported from the United States under Mr Trump’s planned major crackdown on illegal immigrants. The Bahamas declined the request. The Turks and Caicos Islands, a CARICOM associate member which was on the list, hinted its intention to say no, if asked.

This newspaper supports their posture, but this is an issue on which there should be a common, coordinated CARICOM response.

During his first presidency, and in his statements since then, Mr Trump has displayed an irreverence to global norms and for the institutions in which small countries can find some, even if limited, insulation. Which enhances the logic of small countries, such as those that comprise CARICOM, finding common ground and acting together if faced with issues such as sharp rise in tariffs, which Mr Trump says he will impose on imports from Mexico, Canada, China, and perhaps others.

In an apparent reprising of the Monroe Doctrine, Trump has said that the United States will “take back” the Panama Canal, which the US, under a 1977 treaty, had returned to Panama.

He claims that Panama was unfair to the US in the rates it charges American ships for using the canal. He also says, unfoundedly, that China, a major funder of infrastructure projects in the Caribbean, controls the canal.

This issue, too, should concentrate the minds of CARICOM’s leaders in formulating responses to the new Trump presidency, although some may feel that they have a shot of pursuing their interests with the US administration separately.

Given Mr Trump’s mercurial nature, these matters of concern may come to naught. In other instances, his utterances may be designed to keep adversaries and allies off balance. But there are some fundamental Trump policies for which the Caribbean may, for the US president, just be collateral damage.

It makes sense, in the circumstances, for CARICOM to hang together, lest they become victims of failing to listen to Ben Franklin.