A few days ago, the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, met with Caribbean leaders in Washington to discuss the region’s long term approach to energy security. The meeting, displaced from Miami by the Miss Universe pageant, which had made January 26 a no go date for hotel rooms there, was unusual because it set out clearly for the first time in many years what now leads US policy towards the Caribbean.
Speaking about this, the US Vice President said that two issues motivated the US in the Caribbean region. “President Obama has made it absolutely clear that [in] both the Caribbean and Central America energy and security are primary issues for us… This is extremely important to us. It’s overwhelmingly in the interest of the United States of America that we get it right, and that this relationship changes for the better across the board. So I want you to know that the combination of those two issues are paramount issues with us, equal to anything else we are doing around the world,” he said.
Speaking to a mix of Caribbean prime ministers and foreign ministers he made clear that falling oil prices and the plummeting cost of alternative energy offered an