Bahamian Foreign Affairs - Venezuela, Caricom & the US

by Larry Smith

At a recent University of the West Indies conference here, a participant named Maxine Seymour delivered a paper exploring Bahamian attitudes towards Caribbean integration.

She contrasted our relations with Caricom and the United States: “It is possible that the country (sic) that acts as the more influential external source may be the one that the Bahamas is more integrated with.”

Ms Seymour compared the many American fast food joints here with the absence of West Indian restaurants, observed that Bahamian kids played basketball rather than cricket, and noted that we declined regional participation to set up our own replacement for the British GCE, “usually accompanied by the SAT – a US exam.”

Turning to economics, she said tourism earns half of our national income, and about 90 per cent of our visitors are from North America. More than a hundred US-affiliated businesses operate here and most imports of food and manufactures come from the US, which – at its closest point – is only 45 miles away.

The United States and the Bahamas co-operate closely on matters such as law enforcement, civil aviation, marine research, meteorology and agriculture. The US Embassy contributes about $26 million a year in direct inputs to the Bahamian economy, not including the $10.8 million from the US Navy for the AUTEC facility on Andros.

But, while acknowledging that “the US boasts strong ties and neighbourly cooperation,” Ms Seymour was still able to complain about the Bahamian lack of integration with the Caribbean.

Her contrarian conclusion was that US/Bahamian relations “cannot be sustained at the expense of strengthening ties with the Caribbean...the US and the Bahamas may be friends, but the Bahamas and the countries of the Caribbean are family.”

Quite how she arrived at this inane bottom line is beyond us. But her view points up the inability of a large section of the local intelligentsia to deal with reality. It is the same difficulty that many other nations of the world face, as a celebrated book by American foreign policy analyst Michael Mandelbaum recently made clear.

Those who complain the most about United States policies frequently argue with satisfaction that the Iraq War marks the limit of American power and even heralds an international backlash against the US. That may be so, but we should carefully consider what we wish for and whether it is in our own best interest.

In his book, the Case for Goliath (published last year), Mandelbaum says the enormous power and influence of the United States since the Second World War, and especially since the end of the Cold War, is the defining feature of contemporary world affairs.

But even more than that, he argues that America has become the world’s government – the most open and democratic society on the planet guarantees international security, acts as the world’s monetary authority, promotes free trade and sustains global economic demand.

He begins by describing an image of the US that could be recited by almost any Bahamian politico: the foreign policy of the world’s strongest country resembles the conduct of a schoolyard bully who randomly assaults others, steals the lunch money of weaker students and generally makes life
unpleasant.

But he ends by noting that an accurate judgement of the American role in the world depends on whether that role is preferable to the plausible alternative, which is “not considerably better global government but considerably less of it, and the consequences are not likely to be pleasant.”

Mandelbaum’s thesis is that the US role as the world’s government is made possible by a modern consensus in favour of three great ideas: “peace as the proper aim of foreign policy; democracy as the best form of government; and the free market as the only satisfactory way of organising economic affairs.”

The American role began with the reconstruction of the international order after the Second World War and continued under the security umbrella it offered during the Cold War. Far from acting as imperialist occupiers, the reassurance provided by the US military served as a hedge against dangerous uncertainty.

“The United States has undertaken broad responsibilities that redound to the benefit of others,” Mandelbaum says. “However, in important ways the world’s strongest power does not act like (Goliath). If America is a Goliath, it is a benign one.”

Without American reassurance, it is likely that many other countries would have armed themselves with nuclear weapons. And “The spread of nuclear weapons to countries that do not already have them is widely considered to be the single greatest threat” to all of us in the 21st century.

“The United States has made the prevention of nuclear non-proliferation one of its most important foreign policies, and its efforts to this end constitute, like reassurance, a service to other members of the international system.”

And just as within countries it is the government that provides the secure framework for commerce, “in the international economy much of the confidence needed to proceed with transactions and the protection that engenders this confidence come from the policies of the United States...Thus in matters of international economics, as with international security, the world’s strongest country functions as the world’s government.”

Both of these functions intersect in Iraq, where the American military disarmed a dangerous rogue state within three weeks while simultaneously securing the world’s oil supply. For those who prefer to paint this scenario in Marxist or Islamist terms, we have only to consider the consequences of a major interruption in the availability of oil.

“Oil must move across sovereign borders in huge quantities for the global economy to keep turning over,” Mandelbaum points out. “It is the United States that has undertaken the principal responsibility for safeguarding this movement...in much the same way that governments have the responsibility for delivering water and electricity within their jurisdictions.”

There is no doubt that America’s global role has attracted widespread disapproval and hostility in the first decade of the 21st century, something which Mandelbaum attributes to fear and insecurity caused by rapid and sweeping social change around the world. It is a resentment that spawns conspiracy theories blaming Washington for every confusion.

But despite the hostile criticism, “Without the American role in providing a secure political framework for trade and investment, a currency for global transactions, a large market for foreign products, and loans for countries in acute financial distress, the economic prospects of other countries would suffer, and their governments knew this even if they did not often say so.”

In other words, because the US does not threaten the vital interests of other countries, and promotes values that are widely shared while providing important services to the international community, there is no serious opposition to its role in the world.

In fact, Mandelbaum says, most countries are willing “free riders”, because the costs of providing governmental services to the world are paid for by the American people. Unfortunately, it is uncertain just how long they will be willing to foot the bill.

“The greatest threat to the American international position in the 21st century seems more likely to come from the competing costs of social welfare programmes within the US, which threaten to reduce public support for any and every other public purpose,” Mandelbaum says. This means that “in the course of the new century the world may have to do without some, or even most, of the global governance the US was supplying when the century began.”

What would the consequences be? The world would certainly be a less secure and less prosperous place. And at worst there could be a recurrence of economic and political catastrophes on the scale of the Great Depression and World War 2.

Energy security is the most obvious potential flashpoint. It is one of the critical issues of our day, because without a free flow of the oil that powers the world’s industries, our economies will grind to a halt. The prospect of a reckless dictator controlling more than 40 per cent of the global oil supply was one of the main reasons the US went to war against Saddam Hussein - twice.

And leading the transition from an energy system relying heavily on oil to one making greater use of other sources of energy is “an immense long-term undertaking that involves replacing the very foundations of the international economy. A task for which a major American role is necessary,”
Mandelbaum points out.

So what has all this got to do with the Bahamas? Well, in this context the noises that Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez makes about cutting oil supplies to the US are more than just a joke. That country supplies about 11 per cent of current US oil imports and according to a recent report, a Venezuelan oil embargo against the US would result in a significant increase in crude oil prices and a reduction in US gross domestic product, which would feed instability throughout the region.

Chavez is also using his oil money to buy political influence in the Caribbean and Latin America, as well as weapons from Russia and China. He is co-operating with Iran on nuclear technology and is seeking to reconstitute a broad anti-American front with Fidel Castro. Yet the current Bahamian government seems content to join the rest of Caricom in supporting him.

The Bahamas and Caricom voted to put Cuba on the new UN Human Rights Council in explicit defiance of American requests. And more recently the Bahamas and Caricom are supporting Venezuela’s bid for a seat on the UN Security Council, which will give Chavez a big opportunity for disruption. There is also a strong interest among PLP leaders in joining PetroCaribe, Chavez’ regional oil financing cartel.

These are serious foreign policy issues that should not be taken lightly, although our government has been less than open about them. It is difficult to see what we can possibly hope to gain by engaging in such anti-American adventurism. Indeed, the latest news is that Caricom now wants to negotiate a trade pact with the US and doesn’t see why the relationship with Venezeula should interfere with that.

Our politicos like to refer airily to geopolitics when discussing our supposedly “necessary and inevitable” integration with Caricom. But, just like Maxine Seymour in her UWI paper, they are really spitting in the wind. North America is, and will remain, our chief geopolitical reality. It would be far wiser to simply acknowledge that fact and work with it.

In the final analysis, our politicos should recognise that any serious disruption to the present international system would have a dramatic impact on the Bahamas because it would devastate the world economy by restricting the cross-border flows of goods, money and people that we depend on.

To the extent that American policies reduce this likelihood, the US is performing a service of “unsurpassed importance” for the rest of the world. And we should support that.