THINGS fall apart, the centre is clearly not holding, and anarchy seems to have been unleashed upon the world.

I was born two years after the end of World War II in which some 80 million people were killed. In a never-again reaction, world leaders came together and agreed on an architecture that would guide relations among countries to prevent another such conflagration. Its core principles were:

• sovereign equality of all states

• equal rights and fundamental freedoms for all people

•maintenance of international peace and security

• avoidance of the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State

• the use of peaceful means, rather than military force, to settle disputes between states.

Those principles have not always triumphed. There have been hundreds of armed conflicts between countries since World War II, but they were regarded as deviations from the rules, not the new norm…until now, until Donald Trump.

Trump has almost effortlessly upended the world’s rules-based system that, with all its deficiencies, we had come to recognise and even take for granted. He has neutered the World Trade Organization which is supposed to ensure fair trade among countries by the widescale unilateral imposition of import tariffs, the US being the world’s largest importer. He has placed in uncertainty the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the most effective deterrent against Russian aggression, with the threat of US withdrawal.

He has hobbled the vital effort to mobilise a global response to climate change by the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. He has reincarnated the Monroe Doctrine, but with an undisguised interpretation that the Western Hemisphere exists primarily for the interests and benefit of the United States.

It is on the basis of what he has renamed the “Donroe Doctrine” that the US has launched, so far, 35 strikes killing more than 100 people on boats, including in the Caribbean Sea, which it claims were transporting narcotics to the United States. No evidence was ever provided and no attempt was ever made to apprehend and prosecute the alleged traffickers. What evidence there may have been has been obliterated along with the lives of the boat occupants. Trump’s USA has arrogated to itself the right to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in accordance with its redefinition of the rule of law.

Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to use military force, if necessary, to annex resource-rich Greenland, and this past week said that he would make a decision on this “within the next 20 days to two months”. He has also set his sights on Canada, which is actually larger than the United States and which he wants to become its 51st state. It is not far-fetched that he would consider using military force to do so, which would certainly overwhelm Canada’s defence capability. With Greenland and Canada, the US would more than double its land area, displacing Russia as the world’s largest country. No doubt, this is part of his legacy ambitions.

Denmark, of which Greenland is a dependency, and Canada, both members of NATO, seem to be relying on Article 5 of the NATO treaty which speaks to collective security and provides that an attack on any one member State is an attack on all and for which there would be a collective response. It is not likely to work. The treaty provides that each country’s response shall be “as it deems necessary”. That could mean financial contributions or diplomatic initiatives or simply expressions of solidarity, not boots on the ground or fighter jets in the air.

NATO’s standing response capability provides for the deployment of 100,000 troops within 10 days, another 100,000 troops within 30 days, and a further 300,000 within six months. Half of those troops would be expected to be provided by the US, which it certainly would not provide in combat against itself. Beyond those numbers, it depends on how many additional troops the other member states are willing to provide. A NATO force would hardly be any match against the US military might.

More importantly, the NATO treaty was designed to repel an external attack on a member State. It makes no provision for an attack from within. Faced with such a conundrum, NATO would more than likely disintegrate and Greenland (Denmark’s armed forces are about the size of the Jamaica Defence Force) and Canada (with about 100,000 troops) would be left on their own to contend with the US, which boasts an armed forces compliment of 1.2 million.

Trump’s posture offers a troubling signal to Taiwan, which China has long contended belongs to it, and even South Korea, that North Korea, with its military strength, has long wanted to capture. Other countries with border disputes would now consider new options, free of the constraints of international law.

Trump’s most hegemonic display, however, is the recent invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife on the grounds that they are narco traffickers. Never mind that just last month he granted a full and complete pardon to the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, who had been convicted in US courts and sentenced to 45 years imprisonment on charges almost identical to those laid against Maduro. The inconsistency doesn’t seem to bother Trump one bit. Hernandez earned his pardon by being a vocal Trump supporter.

The US refuses to recognise Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela on the grounds that he stole the 2024 elections. There is convincing evidence that he did so, abused human rights, and reigned oppression on opposition forces in the process. But how is that different from Trump’s attempt to steal the US elections of 2020 by mobilising violent protesters whom he called “patriots” to storm the Capitol and demand that his vice-president “do the right thing” or his retribution on those who prosecuted him for his actions?

He has also voiced strong support for Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil, who attempted to steal the 2022 election, and imposed a 50 per cent tariff on imports from Brazil as punishment after Bolsonaro was convicted and sentenced to 27 years in prison.

Trump declared that the US would now “run” Venezuela, and when asked who would be in charge his response was “Me”. He meant it. He has commandeered 30-50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, saying, “This Oil will be sold at market price, and that money will be controlled by me as president of the United States of America.” He has told the acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriquez, that if she doesn’t cooperate her fate will be worse than that of Maduro. He has warned Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico that they are next on his radar. What blazing audacity! Trump is like a raging bull charging through Half-Way-Tree and mowing down everyone and everything in his path.

Most disheartening is the muted international response to these clear violations of international law and repudiation of the Charter of the United Nations. There has hardly been any outrage. Trump has succeeded in intimidating almost everyone on the planet, and even major countries in Europe are afraid of incurring his wrath.

Even Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy has come out in support of the kidnapping of Maduro, so dependent is he on Trump’s support in his struggle against Russia and oblivious of the fact that what Russia is determined to do to Ukraine is no different from what Trump plans to do to Greenland and perhaps other countries. Such is the power that the country with the strongest economy and the most powerful military in the world can exert. It becomes especially dangerous when that power rests in the hands of a megalomaniac whose inclinations are so mercurial and most virulent at three o’clock in the morning when he should be asleep.

The situation poses a crisis dilemma for Caricom countries that are especially vulnerable. A principled stance for which it is renowned in situations like this is a dangerous gambit in the Trump orbit. Antigua and Barbuda as well as Dominica have recently been slapped with visa restrictions that will have serious implications for their economies when their citizens, business people in particular, have difficulty travelling to the US.

The stated basis is their citizenship by investment programmes, but the real reason is the close relationship that their leaders have had with Maduro. Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, and St Lucia operate similar programmes, but they have not been subjected to these restrictions, their leaders having maintained respectful distance from Maduro. St Vincent and the Grenadines which, under Ralph Gonsalves, was firmly opposed to citizenship by investment programmes would almost certainly have been included in the restriction list if he had retained power in the December election, because he has been Maduro’s staunchest ally within Caricom.

Caricom countries are in a vice. Taking a principled stance against Trump’s rampaging would almost certainly invite retribution. He has already placed in his arsenal the tools for this. These include visa restrictions a la Antigua and Dominica; a requirement for a US$15,000 bond for visa applicants, as has been imposed on some 13 countries; increased tariffs on our exports to the US beyond the 10 per cent that took effect last August; reduction if not termination of financial assistance in critical sectors like health and security; and, perhaps most damaging, restrictions on our access to the international financial system, most of which is channelled through US institutions. Imposing a US$250 tax on airline tickets to Jamaica, for example, would deliver a devastating blow to our tourist arrivals.

We are between a rock and a hard place. No head of Government in Caricom is safe. Any of them could be snatched in the dead of night like Maduro was, with charges to follow.

Caricom faces the additional problem that even if it had the cojones it is unable to speak with one voice. Kamla Persad-Bissessar took a unilateral but decisive position. “Kill them all violently” was her response to the US boat strikes. She went further to declare that “Caricom is not a reliable partner”. She may yet discover to her chagrin and that of the Trinidadian people that under Trump it is the US that is not a reliable partner unless one is willing to do its bidding.

The response to the Maduro capture by even the Organization of American States (OAS) — whose membership includes Venezuela and all the other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean except Cuba — has been far from strident. That, too, is understandable. The US accounts for a half of the OAS’s operating budget. Trump doesn’t need much provocation to scuttle that and ensure its demise.

During my time in office I urged the OAS Permanent Council to flatten the assessed contributions by member states so as to lessen its reliance on the US. Countries like Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic could afford to carry more of the load. Even Jamaica, which contributes only one-twentieth of one per cent should be prepared to do more. I got blank stares in response and we quickly moved to the next agenda item.

We are not in uncharted waters. The threat of recolonisation is upon us, but we have been there before. We are in the waters that we were in 80 years ago. We tried and somehow managed to chart our way through. We will have to do that again. Come 2029 we will say goodbye to Trump. What happens after that will depend on whether he has firmly put in place a new ideology and the framework of a new world order that will enjoy significant support among the American people and whether any of his sycophants will be given the charge in the 2028 presidential elections to perpetuate that legacy. Like it or not, the future of the world now rests in the hands of the American voters.

At 78 years old I had hoped to leave the world a better place than I found it. Much of what I have witnessed, especially in my own country, gave me confidence that that would be so and I would be able to go to my grave with some level of satisfaction. I now have cause to be deeply troubled, which is not a good state of mind to be in at my age. Things are indeed falling apart.

Bruce Golding served as Jamaica’s eighth prime minister from September 2007 to October 2011.

This image shows Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro onboard the USS Iwo Jima after the US military captured him on January 3, 2026. 

Donald Trump

Kamla Persad-Bissessar,

A North Atlantic Treaty Organization force would hardly be any match against the US military might.

A vehicle arrives at the US Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in lower Manhattan as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is expected to be transferred on January 3, 2026. (Photo: AFP)