At first sight, last week’s decision by the US President to abrogate the hard-won 2015 UN Security Council deal on nuclear weapons with Iran may seem to have little bearing on the Caribbean.
What it does, however, is take US exceptionalism to a new level. It ignores the interests of the co-signatories to the agreement including Russia and China and close allies in the EU, all of which continue to believe that the agreement represents a viable way of curbing Iran’s nuclear intent. More broadly, it demonstrates to every other state that Washington has abandoned multilateralism and in the singular pursuit of its own objectives will in future ignore previously valued allies.
Speaking about this in Brussels, the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker observed that the US decision suggests that the US is turning its back on multilateral relations, “no longer wants to cooperate with other parts of the world” and is doing so “with a ferocity that can only surprise us”.
