This year’s world around us

GEORGETOWN, Guyana - As the old year turned, new regimes took hold in both the United States and China, acknowledged by most people in the Caribbean and elsewhere as the countries most likely to determine the international frameworks within which our countries will find it necessary to function.  There was undoubtedly some relief as President Obama was re-elected in November with a majority that seemed to indicate some degree of confidence in him on the part of the American people.
That relief was, however, not particularly confident in terms of any strong feeling that the United States under Obama’s governance, is likely to demonstrate any strong feelings or initiatives towards the Caribbean during his second term. The President had seemed to indicate some promise of increased American interest in the region after his first election when, fortuitously, the Summit of the Americas was held in Trinidad & Tobago in 2009. But the general sense at this point would seem to be that the President’s other preoccupations, in the Middle East and with reworking relations with a China increasingly aggressive in its economic activity and diplomacy, have obviously taken precedence over concerns with small countries in this hemisphere.
Part of this lack of concern has been an American sense, first, that the Latin American environment in which we live would appear to be increasingly able to look after itself, particularly in terms of economic growth; and secondly, that in this hemisphere, the major actors, and in particular Brazil, are inclined to attempt to autonomously forge new relations among themselves, as well as going beyond their geographical sphere to reconfigure their relations with other fast-growing developing states – economies now known as the BRICS.