CARICOM at the Crossroads: Unity or Irrelevance

By Ronald Sanders

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) faces a defining moment. As external pressures mount and powerful nations recalibrate their demands, the 15-member bloc must abandon comfortable rhetoric for uncomfortable realism.

The question is no longer whether CARICOM matters – it’s whether the organization can evolve quickly enough to survive what’s coming.

Beyond Diplomatic Niceties

Disagreement among Caribbean governments is neither surprising nor problematic. Domestic politics will always shape national positions, and transient administrations will inevitably diverge on tactics.

The existential issue runs deeper: Can CARICOM member states – despite their differences – build the collective planning and coordination mechanisms necessary to weather economic, political, and security shocks that increasingly ignore borders?

Economic contagion offers the clearest proof that Caribbean sovereignty is already interdependent. Trade flows, investment patterns, labor mobility, tourism receipts, and financial linkages bind the region’s economies into a network where national downturns become regional crises.

Intra-CARICOM exports from more industrialized members directly determine employment and growth across multiple countries. When one economy stumbles, income evaporates and demand collapses throughout regional supply chains.

Pretending otherwise is dangerous fiction.

Political stress follows identical patterns. When external actors pressure or coerce a member state, tepid or conditional support from Caribbean neighbors doesn’t preserve neutrality – it signals weakness, dilutes deterrence, and invites escalation.

CARICOM’s unity must transcend carefully worded communiqués. It requires timely, consistent, and unambiguous collective action, or it means nothing at all.

This logic applies with particular force to Guyana and Belize, nations whose territorial integrity depends on credible regional backing. Oil and gas revenues have transformed Guyana’s economic trajectory, but wealth offers no protection against geopolitical coercion or diplomatic pressure.

Guyana expects – and deserves – political and diplomatic support from all CARICOM governments when its sovereignty is challenged, just as Belize has relied on unwavering Community support to defend its borders. A weakened, fragmented CARICOM becomes useless precisely when its members need it most.

Guyana and Belize therefore have profound interests in strengthening the economic resilience of every Caribbean state, not from charity, but from strategic necessity.

The Record Speaks

Recent public questioning of CARICOM’s reliability misses the forest for the trees. For over half a century, the Community has provided functional frameworks for cooperation across trade, security, health, disaster response, and diplomacy.

The record is imperfect – what multilateral organization’s isn’t? – but the outcomes are tangible. Without CARICOM, individual states would face the world far more exposed and vulnerable.

On security matters, the facts are unambiguous. CARICOM neither supports nor tolerates drug trafficking, organized crime, or illicit enterprise.

The Community actively collaborates with international partners, including the United States, through intelligence sharing, law enforcement coordination, and maritime security operations. These arrangements are professional, operational, and indispensable to regional stability.

Similarly, CARICOM’s advocacy for the Caribbean as a zone of peace reflects pragmatic recognition that stability enables economic survival. For small states lacking military power, respect for international law and peaceful dispute resolution aren’t ideological preferences – they are existential imperatives.

Storm Warnings

What distinguishes this moment is the convergence of multiple pressures demanding greater collaboration, not less.

Citizenship-by-investment programs operated by five CARICOM states now face existential threats. The European Union has shifted from conditional scrutiny to structural opposition, signaling that CBI programs may justify suspending visa-free travel to the Schengen Area regardless of reforms undertaken.

Meanwhile, the United States has placed Caribbean CBI programs under intense scrutiny, focusing on identity verification, security vetting, and passport issuance integrity.

These pressures won’t remain contained. If they intensify, consequences will cascade beyond the five countries operating CBI programs, affecting investment flows, fiscal stability, financial services, and regional confidence.

The stakes extend far beyond program revenues.

Countries operating CBI programs must therefore meet the highest international standards for applicant vetting, implement jointly agreed regulatory frameworks consistently, impose prompt sanctions for breaches, and insulate systems from corruption or political interference. Half measures won’t suffice.

Every reasonable step must reassure international partners that Caribbean CBI programs are secure, credible, and rigorously enforced.

Visa policy has simultaneously become a sharper instrument of geopolitical leverage. Measures applied to one country can expand rapidly unless concerns are addressed early and collectively.

Every CARICOM economy depends on mobility for tourism, education, business travel, remittances, and diaspora engagement. Fragmented national responses guarantee failure.

A third pressure point emerged around Cuban medical cooperation programs, which became central to US policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025. Caribbean governments face a genuine dilemma: health systems depend heavily on Cuban medical personnel, yet geopolitical realities and international conventions cannot be ignored.

Responsible governance requires developing alternatives to protect public health services while engaging candidly with all partners, including Cuba.

The Asymmetry Problem

These challenges share a common feature: they reflect the asymmetry of power between small states and larger partners. None can be managed effectively by individual countries acting alone.

All underscore the need for genuine reciprocity in international relations.

Cooperation, however, cannot mean capitulation. If small states are expected to alter policies affecting livelihoods, revenues, and social stability, then powerful partners must recognize the costs imposed and engage in solutions preserving viability, not merely extracting compliance.

Reciprocity must be negotiated and agreed – not dictated.

For the Caribbean, strong and predictable relations with the United States remain indispensable. The region’s objective must be partnership that acknowledges the constraints small states face and the shared benefits of stability, growth, and democratic resilience.

The Path Forward

CARICOM’s task is clear. The Community must transition from reactive coordination to proactive planning: shared risk assessment, early consultation, and collective strategies preventing external pressures from forcing unilateral decisions under duress.

As 2026 unfolds, CARICOM faces a binary choice. It can treat each challenge as a national problem to be managed separately, or recognize that Caribbean resilience depends on planning together, speaking with discipline, and acting with foresight.

In a world where power grows impatient and rules are applied selectively, small states endure not by standing apart, but by standing together – clear-eyed about risks, prepared for change, and united in purpose. That must be the work of every CARICOM government in the year ahead.

The alternative is gradual irrelevance, followed by something worse.

Ronald Sanders is Antigua & Barbuda’s Ambassador to the US and the OAS