EDITORIAL - Resetting US-Caribbean relations

When Joe Biden, America's vice-president, stopped in at Port-of-Spain last May for talks with Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders, his visit was overshadowed by that of China's leader, Xi Jinping, a few days later.

Mr Xi, early in his presidency and in one of his first trips abroad, was demonstrating that Beijing considers the Caribbean politically and economically important to China. He backed that up with an announcement of China's offer of US$3 billion in loans to the region's troubled economies.

Additionally, Chinese firms have been busy investing, or preparing to invest, in CARICOM members, and other Caribbean states - like China Harbour Engineering's US$600 million in highway development in Jamaica and its proposed US$1.5 billion in port and logistics projects.

Neither America's government nor its private firms appear, these days, to find that kind of sex appeal in the Caribbean, although Mr Biden's visit was expected to be something of a reset for US-Caribbean relations.

In fact, he and CARICOM leaders signed something called a framework agreement on investment and trade. Both sides also engaged a fair bit on security, which, for the better part of the past two decades, appears to be America's primary interest in the Caribbean - preventing narco-traffickers smuggling drugs into the United States and deporting Caribbean nationals who may have committed crimes in America. Mr Biden's framework agreement notwithstanding, we perceive not much of substance to have happened post the vice-president's visit.

This has largely been the case since the earlier period of the Clinton presidency, when the idea of a hemispheric free trade area, floated by his predecessor, was still in vogue. The Americans, it seems, have not been able to craft Caribbean policy, or a working relationship with the region that fits easily with their post-9/11 priorities and the continued emergence of China as a global economic power.

For that matter, nor have those other traditional Caribbean partners, Britain and Canada. Canadian country-to-country development assistance to Jamaica has ended, for instance, and its last significant political engagement with the region was when it joined the French and the US to resist CARICOM's attempt at the UN to argue that Jean-Bertrand Aristide's America-facilitated ejection from Haiti was an unconstitutional act that should not stand.

CARICOM's disappointment at this foreign policy aloofness towards the region, especially by the Americans, would have been exacerbated because of their expectations from Barack Obama's presidency. His pre-presidential rhetoric and presumed sensibilities raised assumptions of his likely sympathies with the Caribbean.

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