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Executive Summary
This white paper offers a Caribbean-authored reframing of the escalating U.S.–Venezuela confrontation as part of a broader, recurring pattern in global power behavior driven by moral exceptionalism, unresolved historical trauma, and fear-based geopolitical reflexes. From the perspective of small island states, such cycles are not abstract. They directly shape energy access, food security, trade routes, migration flows, health systems, and economic survival.
Building on peace scholarship and trauma science, the paper shows how repression of historical violence and projection of threat onto external adversaries repeatedly narrow policy imagination and normalize coercion. Economic sanctions are examined as forms of dispersed structural violence whose primary victims are civilian populations.
The central contribution of this paper is the articulation of a regenerative security framework as a credible alternative to militarization — one that emphasizes:
- Legal accountability over exceptional force
- Economic inclusion over siege
- Regional cooperation over unilateral intervention
- Narrative repair over moralized enemy construction
Security is reframed as coherence across social, economic, ecological, and historical systems, not the accumulation of coercive power. For the Caribbean, the stakes are immediate. The region therefore calls not for passivity, but for integration over confrontation and repair over repression.
