A few days ago the US President, Barack Obama, gave what in effect was a farewell address to the United Nations General Assembly. It was personal, heartfelt, and frank. It spelt out the challenges that liberal democracies, including those in the Caribbean, will face in the years to come as the stresses caused by globalisation and its progeny, inequality and migration, give rise to populism and autocracy.
In measured but direct remarks which may well come to be seen as prophetic, Mr Obama painted a bleak picture, describing a paradox that has come to define the world of the early twenty first century.
