In recent weeks, I have been troubled by the tenor of our local conversations following US punitive measures relating to immigrant visas and the possible banning of Cuban doctors in Saint Lucia. Most unsettling was the reaction to Prime Minister Hon. Philip J. Pierre’s suggestion that the time may come when Saint Lucia might have to suspend the Cuban Medical Programme and reconsider students studying in Cuba. The US Embassy swiftly indicated that no such request had been made.
What concerns me less is debate about the ideological underpinnings of US foreign policy. Rather, I am alarmed at how quickly many among us drank the imperial juice and concluded that the Prime Minister must have lied. The reflexive response was predictable: “All politicians lie.” Yet by that same logic, are we to assume that an embassy, an instrument of foreign policy, always speaks pure and unvarnished truth? What elevates their account above that of the elected leader of Saint Lucia? This is not rhetorical.
Why would a Prime Minister knowingly fabricate a claim that would invite diplomatic retaliation and hand ammunition to detractors eager to label him naïve or incompetent? Moreover, the broader regional context – Jamaica, Antigua and Barbuda, and others adjusting Cuban programmes under US pressure – renders the possibility of such discussions far from implausible. Yet that context was largely ignored in favour of immediate disbelief.
This reflex reveals something deeper. We seem to imbue external powers with inherent rationality and credibility, while treating our own institutions with suspicion. The US, the EU and multilateral institutions are assumed neutral even when their actions reflect clear geopolitical interests. Meanwhile, our own leaders are presumed irrational or deceptive. Black irrationality remains subject to white rationality; they propose, we doubt ourselves.
Our history is replete with examples: bananas and free trade, international financing, money laundering blacklists, citizenship by investment debates, reparations, and now Cuban doctors. We have internalised the colonial toolkit so thoroughly that, as George Lamming warned, colonial myths outlive colonialism itself.
Former Calypso Monarch Walleigh captured this poignantly in Outside (2022): “We have a mindset and culture of that one side, everything better and everyone wiser from the outside.” That culture persists. We are conditioned to look North for truth.
These conversations expose the urgent need for national decolonial reflection – not as a slogan, but as a psychological and intellectual recalibration. Why are we so eager to believe the unseen external voice over those among us? Why do we accept hegemonic knowledge as neutral, divorced from power and interest? Too often, decisions justified as “national security” or “rules-based order” mask economic expansion and strategic dominance rather than concern for small island development.
At its core, as scholars such as Kohli argue in Greed and Guns, imperial history reflects powerful states advancing economic interests under benevolent language. Security narratives frequently obscure extractive relationships. The United States’ record of overthrows in Iran, Guatemala, Congo and Chile and its opposition to anti-colonial movements illustrate the dissonance between rhetoric and practice. Economic advice to the Global South is often perceived as benefiting foreign corporations and aligned elites more than ordinary citizens.
China’s contemporary expansion differs in method but not necessarily in outcome. Rather than gunboat diplomacy, it has leveraged trade, manufacturing dominance, and largely unconditional loans to embed itself within the US-shaped global order. Many developing countries, fatigued by Washington-led structural adjustment, welcomed this engagement. Yet economic leverage can replicate an informal empire without overt military force.
Beyond geopolitics, we must interrogate another narrative gaining currency: that hegemonic pressure is justified because of our own alleged policy failures. The argument goes that if we had no Citizenship by Investment programme, less corruption, greater diversification and more economic resilience, we would not face pressure. This reasoning is intellectually weak. Even economically diversified and militarily capable states remain subject to US dictates. More critically, it ignores the structural legacies of colonialism that produced our peripheral dependency in the first place.
To blame small island states for their vulnerability while ignoring centuries of extraction is akin to blaming the bullied child for provoking the bully. Reflection on internal reform is necessary, but it must not replace critique of hegemonic overreach.
Locally, it is also worth noting that our leaders across political lines have consistently described the United States as a friend and ally. We have balanced Comptonite “friendship with the West” alongside the Anthony-era South–South engagement. Even if leaders were to criticise US policy, freedom of expression is not grounds for visa restriction. Conditioning mobility on political silence undermines democratic principles.
Yet our diplomatic language often reinforces dependency. We fixate Northward so that when America sneezes, we catch pneumonia. We demonise countries through US narratives while ignoring the neocolonial structures binding us to multilateral institutions heavily influenced by Washington.
Consider structural adjustment across Jamaica, Guyana, Grenada and the OECS: IMF austerity, privatisation and liberalisation weakened social services and narrowed policy space. World Bank models prioritised tourism dependence and export-led growth, privileging foreign investors. WTO rulings dismantled preferential banana and sugar regimes, devastating rural economies in Saint Lucia, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Global financial regulations shaped by the US have also triggered correspondent banking withdrawals, disrupting remittances and trade despite the Caribbean’s marginal role in financial crime. Meanwhile, concessional climate financing remains restricted by per capita income metrics that mask structural fragility. Classified as “middle income”, Caribbean states borrow at near-commercial rates to rebuild after hurricanes while major emitters avoid equivalent burdens.
Governance structures compound this inequity. IMF and World Bank voting power is quota-based, enabling effective US veto influence. By convention, the IMF Managing Director is European and the World Bank President American. Caribbean states share diluted representation in large constituencies, limiting their ability to shape conditionality or reform.
None of this denies that powerful states act in their interests. That is the nature of power. The pressing question is why we suspend critical judgment when those interests are exercised against us. The gravest threat to Caribbean sovereignty is not external pressure alone, but our internalisation of imperial logic and reflexive mistrust of ourselves.
Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney recently observed that systems endure because people perform belief in them; when one actor stops performing, the illusion cracks. Decoloniality demands precisely that withdrawal of automatic performance. It requires epistemic confidence in our institutions and the courage to interrogate power, even when cloaked in partnership language.
Until we unlearn this reflexive Northward gaze, we will remain formally independent yet structurally subordinated, mistaking compliance for prudence and dependency for diplomacy. The work before us is not anti-Americanism, nor romanticism of other powers. It is intellectual sovereignty: the refusal to drink imperial juice without question, and the willingness to trust that our voices, too, are capable of truth.
Well spoken that’s the honest truth
I thoroughly enjoyed this read and I concur with every word.
Excellent Article, if only the wider populace would read and ruminate on it.
This was very edifing and thorough article that many of us needs to read analyse and then challenge ourselves to address that deficiency.
We all need to always challenge our ingrained instinct enslaved mentality to accept, defend, think everthing from outside is best.
This is what happens when there is no clear guidance coming from those who are supposed to be involved in the nation’s external affairs.
The author’s current essay is only valid because it’s deeply-flawed circular reasoning, used to flay the straw men he creates, is reflective of the reactionary, Westphalian mental stasis of his research mentor!
How ironic that he scolds: “many among us drank the imperial juice,” while he engorges himself on the sumptious Rhodes scholarship buffet – a buffet meticulously prepared over centuries, via theft, coercion, extortion, propaganda and genocide (aka “the ideological underpinnings of US foreign policy”)!
I had a chuckle when I realised that the author’s mental gluttony (at the academic “all-you-can-eat”) prevented him from seeing how “slogan” is the very means by which his “benefactors” achieved their goal of “psychological and intellectual recalibration” since the abolition of slavery.
The rest of the essay, after the author’s fraudulent call-to-action (no action at all), “national decolonial reflection,” is all about my aforementioned “flaying of straw men.”
The US hegemonic aggression (over the last 150 years of its constitutional existence) have never been against the straw man, anti-colonialism. It has been rigorously directed against any entity which sought to preserve its patrimony for the benefit of its people, against predatory capitalism, as practiced by the US (economically enforced via the policies of the IMF & World Bank; militarily enforced by US armed forces stationed at more than 800 bases around the globe; diplomatically enforced wherever a US consulate or embassy was permitted to exist).
The author unwittingly exposed his guilt for drinking the “imperial juice” when he asserted that “China’s contemporary expansion differs in method but not necessarily in outcome.” China has never expressed any imperial designs, so I will give the author the benefit of the doubt, and what he really meant to say was economic expansion instead of the ambiguous “contemporary expansion.” I contend (and public record confirms) that China’s methods produces outcomes that are positively poles apart from those achieved by the western imperium. Using a hybrid of 50% private & 50% state capitalism (method), China’s domestic outcome has been to lift 800 million of its citizens out of poverty, and into a standard of living far superior to that being experienced by 95% of citizens in the US empire. Internationally, China’s methods produces modern infrastructure, education, healthcare, economic growth, and sovereignties intact; without debt slavery, a required outcome by the west.
The author’s treatise is further weakened by his acceptance of “states’ interests”, an anachronism rooted in the reactionary Westphalian system, when the capitalist powers of the time sat down together to partition the bounties of Africa, Asia, and Latin America amongst themselves. That idea (states’ interests) was promoted (propagandized) to the subjects of these monarchies in order to efface from public scrutiny (i.e., avoiding revolutionary thoughts), the banking empires responsible for underwriting the existence of these self-same monarchies.
Today, those bankers have become economically anational, choosing instead to hide behind multinational corporations, instead of nation states; while they still use the public purse (in the US) to manufacture weapons (guns, not butter) for perpetuating their regime of plunder & mayhem – plunder of states’ resources, while sowing mayhem through political in-fighting (so-called democracy).
St. Lucia has had 47 years of so-called independence, where each succeeding government has excused their civic failures on the nation’s victimhood at the hands of the criminal capitalists fronted by the US empire. That excuse has worn thin. Any objective analysis will concede that the government and people of St. Lucia are really accomplices to western tyranny!