Caribbean & Central America - October 2026

President Donald Trump’s administration has been clear about its determination to keep the Western Hemisphere aligned with US policies and to exclude, where possible, outside influence. The small states of the English-speaking Caribbean are in no position to resist this assertion of US hegemony, but at the same time they haven’t become entirely aligned. They have used their votes in the United Nations (where, theoretically at least, they have exactly the same weight as all other non-veto-wielding states) to oppose US policy over, for instance, Gaza and Cuba. They also have strongly different views on multilateralism and climate change. But they do have to be careful not to go too far. Retribution from an angered President Trump can be severe, so they are performing a delicate balancing act.

The strategic importance of the Caribbean to Washington was well put in an April 2022 paper written by Professor Evan Ellis for the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a US think tank. In the opening paragraphs, Ellis wrote: “The Caribbean is strategically vital as the southeast maritime approach to the United States. It is a key hub and transit area for commercial logistics serving the eastern coast of the United States… The region is connected to the United States through ties of commerce, geography, and family.”

Ellis went on to say: “The United States relies on good governance in the Caribbean and partnership on a range of national security issues, including the entry of illegal narcotics (principally moving north from Colombia and Venezuela) and other contraband goods. Even more importantly, the Caribbean touches – or is proximate to – a substantial number of important US ports and military facilities, such as Jacksonville, Florida; Savannah and Kings Bay, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; and Norfolk, Virginia.”

One main concern for the US, strongly emphasised by Ellis, is China’s interest in the region which has included investment in major tourism and infrastructure projects in, amongst others, The Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname.

Then there are the newly developing opportunities following major oil discoveries in Guyana and (to a lesser extent, so far) Suriname that the Trump administration is keen for US companies to participate in.

The seemingly domineering approach of the Trump administration towards the US’ immediate neighbours was highlighted graphically on 7 September when Trump posted an image on Truth Social of the US flag spread across Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, with the whole area labelled “United States of America”. The message appeared to be that he considers the independence of these countries to be conditional not absolute.

Two other recent episodes will have been noted by the small states of the Caribbean with equal attention. The first was the US intervention to seize Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro (2013-2026) on 3 January, since when his replacement as president, his former deputy Delcy Rodríguez, has governed under close US supervision. The second was President Trump’s strong hint that the US might change its policy on the Falklands/Malvinas dispute because of his annoyance with the UK for not initially supporting the US war with Iran.

With regards to Venezuela, on 28 August President Trump announced the completion of “the biggest oil deal in world history”, which will give the US government control over some 65bn barrels of proven oil reserves. The benefits that the United States will reap are likely to be enormous. The US has, in the words of the State Department, secured majority control over approximately one-fifth of Venezuela’s reserves of roughly 300bn barrels to ensure “our energy dominance for the next century” at “zero cost to the United States”. President Trump described the deal as a “gift from Venezuela to the people of the United States”.

For Venezuela, a country that has for years been viscerally nationalist about its oil resources, the deal is a singularly stark reminder of the US’ bargaining power when it wishes to exert it. The small states of the Caribbean cannot have missed the point.

With regards to the Falklands dispute, Guyana and Belize, in particular, will also have paid the closest attention to the US’ threat to the UK over possibly changing its hitherto neutral stance on the dispute with Argentina. Nothing of real strategic significance has happened for the US to change its stance, except that the current president of Argentina, Javier Milei, is a strong supporter of President Trump, while the UK has proven less supportive than the US would like over Iran and Gaza.

For Guyana, which is subject to a major territorial claim from Venezuela, and for Belize, which is similarly challenged by Guatemala, the message will have had particular resonance.

Yet, despite all this, the Caribbean has, for the most part, retained a certain degree of independence from Washington. The only Caribbean leader to have been unfailingly supportive of the Trump administration has been Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar of Trinidad & Tobago. She has supported the Pentagon’s controversial use of force against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean, and Trinidad & Tobago is one of only two Caribbean countries (along with Guyana) to have joined the Trump administration’s Shield of the Americas security initiative. Among other things (mostly to do with countering drug-trafficking and organised crime), the Shield of the Americas commits its adherents to keeping out “malign foreign influences from outside the Western Hemisphere”, a clear reference to China.

China’s influence in the Caribbean is substantial and continuing to grow, with particularly strong engagement in Jamaica, Guyana, and The Bahamas.

In Jamaica, the Chinese state-owned China Merchants Port Holdings has a 49% interest in Kingston Freeport Terminal, which has a 30-year concession to develop and operate Kingston Container Terminal; the China Harbour Engineering Company (CHEC) built the US$458m Jamaica North South Highway with financing from the China Development Bank on the basis of a 50-year concession from the Jamaican government to collect tolls; and China’s Jiuquan Iron and Steel Company (JISCO) plans to spend US$490m to modernise and increase capacity at its Alpart alumina refinery which was acquired a decade ago from Russian firm UC Rusal for a reported US$299m.

In Guyana, the Bank of China is financing the new Demerara River Bridge and Chinese companies are deeply involved in oil-boom-related infrastructure and health-sector construction.

And in The Bahamas, the Freeport Container Port is part of the portfolio of Hong Kong-based multinational CK Hutchison; the North Abaco port is Chinese financed; and the giant Baha Mar tourist resort was financed with a US$2.45bn secured loan from the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank).

Another Caribbean nation that has received considerable Chinese investment is Antigua & Barbuda where the St John’s Deep Water Harbour was redeveloped with around US$90m in financing from the Eximbank, and now Chinese businessman Yida Zhang, working with the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) is developing an 810-hectare Special Economic Zone (SEZ) which will include an international port and transportation hub.

Despite all this engagement with China, and more, there have been few examples of Caribbean countries obviously reducing their engagement with China at the behest of the US. The Bahamas, for instance, resisted pressure in April this year over Chinese funding for Nassau’s new hospital. Jamaica did acquiesce in a US-led security assessment of its main ports, but it has not responded with any move against China Merchants. Guyana, too, has maintained its strong ties with China despite a very close alignment with the US over the development of oil resources and Venezuela policy. In May 2026, foreign ministers from Caribbean Community (Caricom) member states emphasised the importance of “strategic diversification of international partnerships”.

One area where the Caribbean has most obviously distanced itself from US policy has been in voting at the United Nations. On the 12 June 2025 UN General Assembly resolution demanding an immediate, unconditional, and permanent Gaza ceasefire, the US voted No. Of the 14 Caricom members with a vote at the UN, 12 voted Yes, with Haiti absent and Dominica abstaining. On 12 September 2025, when the UN General Assembly endorsed a two-state solution for Palestine, 10 Caricom countries voted Yes, against the strong opposition of the US, while Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, and Haiti did not vote. And on 29 October 2025, all 14 Caricom states opposed the US on the annual resolution calling for an end to the US embargo of Cuba.

One of the most-sensitive issues has been the US policy of targeting alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean. At the time of writing in late September there had been 70 such attacks in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September 2025 in which at least 234 people had been killed. The first attack, on 2 September 2025, killed 11 people in the waters between Venezuela and Trinidad & Tobago, and reports suggested that some of those killed had survived the first attack and were killed in a follow-up strike while in the water.

While most Caricom countries cooperate on security matters with the US through the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI), which dates back to the presidency of Barack Obama (2009-2017), and through Caricom’s own Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (CARICOM IMPACS), Caribbean disquiet with the US attacks has been clear, and openly expressed, with the most emphatic stated criticism coming from Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados. On 25 October 2025, she said: “We do not accept that any entity has the right to engage in extrajudicial killings of persons that they suspect of being involved in criminal activities”.

Ralph Gonsalves, the long-serving prime minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines from 2001-2025, is another who has voiced his opposition openly, albeit more so since losing office last year. In October 2025, when still prime minister, he described the attacks as “misguided”. In February 2026, as now leader of the opposition, he responded to a strike that reportedly killed three St Lucians by saying: “You cannot just execute them at sea. That is a species of barbarism contrary to American values, contrary to international law and contrary to American jurisprudence.”

In late 2025, Belize’s foreign minister, Francis Fonseca, called the killings “extrajudicial”, a term also used by former Trinidad & Tobago attorney general Garvin Nicholas, who called them “obviously extrajudicial”.

Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali, a strong US ally, has been more cautious, saying on 8 March at the end of the inaugural Shield of the Americas summit that “we support the strong action” against drug cartels and adding that Guyana had “supported the charter to deal with transnational crime, especially narco-terrorism and these cartels”. However, the accompanying proclamation from the summit would have given him comfort with its emphasis on legality. It said: “Criminal cartels and foreign terrorist organizations in the Western Hemisphere should be demolished to the fullest extent possible consistent with applicable law.”

As mentioned above, the only Caribbean leader to have provided unequivocal support to the US has been Trinidad & Tobago’s prime minister, Persad-Bissessar, who has called the strikes “lawful, coordinated, and respectful of our national values and international obligations”.

Two final areas where the Caribbean has remained strongly opposed to the Trump administration are multilateralism and climate change, both vital issues for these small island nations. One-country, one-vote multilateralism gives them a far greater say in international affairs than their size would warrant. Theoretically, the 48,000 people of St Kitts & Nevis have exactly the same weight in the UN General Assembly as India’s 1.48bn – and collectively Caricom has 14 votes, 7.25% of the total, as against its 0.23% share of world population.

On climate change, too, there can be no compromise for the Caribbean. It considers itself threatened by, inter alia, stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels and coastal erosion, the possible impact on tourism, and a lack of resources to deal with repeated natural disasters. It needs money to build resilience, and it believes that the world should move as quickly as it can to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions.

The Trump administration, by contrast, rejects much of the prevailing international climate-policy consensus. It has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and it has ended participation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The White House is opposed to international organisations promoting what it calls “radical climate policies”. On this, the divergence in thinking between the US and Caricom member states is total.

The interesting conclusion of all this is that while the Caribbean is unquestionably of great strategic significance to the United States, for the most part Washington seems willing to accept a degree of dissent from the small and vulnerable countries of the English-speaking Caribbean, even on such important issues as China relations, without threatening the kind of retribution it has meted out to Canada and others that have been unwilling to bend to its will.

Nevertheless, there are still clear dangers for the Caribbean. First, there is always the possibility that President Trump may decide to exact retribution from Caricom and its members for a lack of solidarity with the US. It would be unwise to assume that the Caribbean will always manage to remain below his radar. Secondly, lack of US support for climate-change mitigation planning will inevitably hamper the Caribbean’s efforts to build resilience. And, thirdly, the weakening of multilateral rules and institutions on which very small states depend for protection is not in the interests of the Caribbean. In a world in which “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must”, the small states of the Caribbean would feel exceptionally exposed.