Dear Editor,
As we observe the shifting plates of the global order, it is imperative to move beyond what Niall Ferguson identifies as the “romanticisation of revolution” that plagues our academic clerisy. We are witnessing a resurgence of Socialist Romanticism—a dangerous intellectual vanity that views Western power as the sole impediment to global harmony, while ignoring the predatory reality of the illiberal regimes waiting in the wings.
The “Never-Trump” fixation has created a strategic myopia, where a visceral distaste for a single politician’s style has led to a wholesale abandonment of cold-eyed realism. This is most evident in local immigration policies and the dismissal of border integrity and cultural cohesion, which treats the nation-state as an outdated relic rather than the essential container for the Rule of Law.
We must be clear-eyed about the nature of empires. The world has never ceased to be a stage for imperial competition; the choice is merely between different orders. In Jamaica, we must confront what Peter Espeut calls the “myth of independence”.
Historically, the American “Empire” has functioned as a liberal Leviathan. Consider the U.S.-Greenland nexus: since the 1941 Kauffmann Agreement, the U.S. has acted as a security guarantor, maintaining the Arctic as a zone of stability. Whether we like it or not, through that agreement there has been the provision of a “global public good”. Contrast this with the BRICS alignment—a fragile “marriage of convenience” between a revanchist Russia, a mercantilist China, and Islamist Iran. BRICS offers no coherent moral or legal framework, only a shared resentment of the West.
In our own backyard, the role of Jamaica and CARICOM deserves scrutiny. For years, the region was seduced by the Petro-Caribe initiative—a mechanism of “oil-for-influence” that effectively subsidised the Bolivarian destruction of Venezuela (while validifying the funding through Venezuela of other oppressive regimes, e.g., in Iran, Russia and Cuba). By accepting these terms, regional leaders became silent partners in the oppression of the Venezuelan people and the preservation of the Cuban geriatric autocracy. Furthermore, the Cuban medical missions, frequently utilised in Jamaica, represent a profound legal hypocrisy. Under the guise of “internationalism”, these doctors are often subjected to what some international observers classify as forced labour—deprived of their free movement and fair wages to fund the Cuban state.
The historical tragedy of Iran serves as the ultimate warning. In 1979, the “Socialist-Islamic” synthesis—supported by an infatuated academic elite—overthrew a flawed but modernising state to install a regime of Islamism, oppression and regional terror. Today, that same academic machinery champions an anti-Israel movement that obscures the reality of Hamas and Hezbollah as proxies for Iranian and Muslim Brotherhood expansionism.
The “hard cold world” does not offer a choice between perfection and evil but between the Western Liberal Order—rooted in Judeo-Christian values and the Enlightenment—and a dark alternative of surveillance states and Islamism. We must cease the self-flagellation.
Viva free Cuba, viva free Venezuela, and viva free Iran, and let us maintain a sober gratitude for the United States, a deeply flawed but necessary shield of our imperfect but precious civilisation.
I am,
Francesca Tavares